Cover yourself up, Love

While American popstars like Amerie and Kelly Clarkson get special funding to learn how to nearly-but-not-quite show their knickers onstage and in photoshoots, their British counterparts are not so lucky.

Some UK acts have coped quite well with the lack of professional guidance and government funding, and remain quietly dignified in all their skirtraising enterprises.

Others, however, have taken the lack of regulation and…well…

You can always trust someone from Runcorn to take things too far.

This is EXACTLY why our popstars need proper funding for what they do. To stop incidents like this, and make sure that future generations of our song and dance elite don’t make the same mistakes, contact your local MP, TODAY, and demand better popstar training.

Spinning Around

Hadouken! - Liquid Lives
More ‘crazy beats + Mega Drive + baseball caps x grime = 2007’ madness from the band who recently had two whole pages in the NME devoted to whether they are shit or brilliant. This should help bolster the case for the latter somewhat, being as it is COMPLETELY AMAZING.

Amerie - Because I Love It (LP)
If Amerie keeps improving at the rate she is doing, she’ll be absolutely brilliant by 2009. She’s already ten times better than Beyoncé, who’s going in the opposite direction.

The Tigerpicks - Disco Punk Electro Funk
Already cited here as being a bit like an indie band making a brilliant stab at being Girls Aloud, this gets released properly this week and is definitely worth your pocket money.

Sergey Lazarev - Shattered Dreams
An update of the Johnny Hates Jazz original which, if it were a stick of rock, would surely have the words ‘AMYL’ and ‘NITRATE’ emblazoned in big bold letters through its core.

Groove Armada - Song 4 Mutya (Out Of Control)
This week we are enjoying finally knowing the proper title and the “hey!” bits.

Feist - Mushaboom
It’s not on her brilliant new album but we have been listening to this advert staple a helluva lot lately; mainly because it’s not on her brilliant new album. Did we mention she’s got a brilliant new album? It’s brilliant.

She's just one person

Amerie’s album is out this week, and despite the artwork…

…we would like to point out that she has not been cloned.

Obviously the world of pop would be a lot better if most singers of Amerie’s ‘ilk’ were culled and replaced by her, but since human cloning - like Beyoncé being good again - remains a distant dream, we will have to make do with just the one for now.

If Amerie did attempt to do the work of all the mediocre female popstars out there she would burn out with nervous exhaustion by lunchtime next Tuesday. Then she’d probably take two years off with a ‘stress related illness‘ or something, which we couldn’t have at all.

‘Because I Love It’ by Amerie (singular) is out now.

Over here (in our charts)

TUNE OF THE WEEK
Hellogoodbye - Here (In Your Arms)

Releasing your best song as a lead single might seem like common sense to most of us, but after a year when people have been quite happy to “do the Rudebox” (Gwen), or push brilliant songs right down the release schedule (Amerie, Scissor Sisters), it comes as some relief that Hellogoodbye are doing the decent thing and bunging us ‘Here (In Your Arms)’ just in time for summer.

The rest of Hellogoodbye’s songs might be fairly mediocre and vocoder-free but the same goes for most bands these days, and we don’t see any of them getting naked at the drop of a hat.

‘Here (In Your Arms)’ is brilliant, and not least because it sounds like it’s going to morph into T.a.t.u.’s ‘Malchik Gay‘ at any moment. Synths, heartthrob vocals and those Xenomania-style backwards cymbals are all on the menu as the band rip through a fine appropriation of boybandiness that would put most real exponents of the art to shame.

Very good indeed.

Spinning Around

Amerie - Gotta Work
Horns! Drums! Lyrics about making a bit of an effort! If Beyonce had been similarly keen after ‘Crazy In Love’, we might have had this instead of all the dreadful songs she released instead. Brilliant.

Alanis Morissette - 8 Easy Steps
The fuss over her BEP cover made us revisit one of her previous finest moments. This is amazing proto-Avril pop rock, and features the immortal line ‘I’ve been practising my ass off’.

The Tigerpicks - Crazy Juices
This song sounds a bit like Fischerspooner might if they were forty years younger. It’s a high-NRG hands-in-the-air BANGER and ever so slightly bonkers. There is a ‘piece’ about the band further down the page. Scroll to it if you wish, or if you are lazy click here.

Dragonette - Take It Like A Man
Still.

Vicky Nolan - Look Out Your Window
Gorgeous coffee-table strum which is nowhere near as boring as that description makes it sound.

Timbaland - Shock Value
We’re still listening to Tim’s latest epic (but not all in one go). Amazing songs on this album include: Release, The Way I Are, Time, One And Only, Apologize, Come Around. If he’d used those songs as the backbone to the album and put in some of the less-amazing-but-still-good ones, like Give It To Me, around them, it would have been SILLY GOOD.