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.

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.

Burn Me Out

Manchester: full of people with ridiculous haircuts playing Stone Roses records to gullible students, right?

WRONG!

Some of the people with ridiculous haircuts are in brilliant electro bands:

Presenting The Tigerpicks, a new band from Manchester who have recently taken several things by storm (including the In The City conference and Deltasonic record label) by playing their own brand of noisy electro sexdisco to assorted impressed gawpers.

They are Frankie Ross, Martyn Anderson and Emma "Reece" Leatherbarrow; shown in some kind of order in the photo above. Assuming that the one in the middle is Martyn, we reckon that the one on the right of the picture looks like an Emma and the one on the left is therefore definitely Frankie. It could equally be the other way around though, we suppose.

Their signature tune (more bands should have them) is ‘Disco Punk Electro Funk’, which sounds like a non-boring indie band having a go at being Girls Aloud and getting away with it better than anyone could have expected. It is, therefore, amazing.

And when they’re not sounding like everyone’s favourite girl band, things get even more bonkers. ‘Crazy Juices’ is a big thumping bastard of an electro record very much of the hands-in-the-air school of these things; ‘Burn Me Out’ is more of the same with added rawk guitars and ridiculous operatic bits all over the place and ’Pow Pow Pow’ has a bit in it where the vocals go all old rave and urge the listener to “oooh trip the light fantastic” and so on, which is brilliant.

Revision Pointers:

: : Manchester
: : Electro
: : Good hair
: : Bits you think you can sing along to but find out you can’t when you actually try.
: : Massive danceability rating
: : Amazing