A God-awful Small Affair

In my iTunes library I had two Hives songs - Hate to Say I Told You So and Tick Tick Boom . Let's be honest: they're by far their best. Some people seemed to relish the prospect of a return from the Swedish garage (really?) rockers. I never did. Why am I writing this then? Indeed. From the opening chants of "Come On!" (that somehow makes Gary Glitter's Rock & Roll seem charming and melodic) to the shouty reverie of 'Midnight Shifter' you essentially have 12 ceaseless choruses. You don't need me to tell you this. They're the 21st century Status Quo. Dependable to churn out the same repetitive, nauseating, arse-clenching, bile-spewing predictable shit. Enough, now. Rating: 1/10 Highlights: none, really. Avoid: Come On! Horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible mess. Artwork Watch: If I'm honest I highly doubt that their silhouettes resemble the latin alphabet. Up next: Regina Spektor  

Somewhere on the walls of my bedroom in my old house there were the lyrics to Black and Gold scrawled in felt tip pens. Sparro's debut single, in all of its sleek glittery glory, carried such an effortlessly cool aesthetic both visually (the music video took place in a limousine!) and sonically. Even without Sparro's breathy soul vocal, the track just oozed sex to me. Not necessarily a one-hit wonder for me, '21st Century Life' and 'Hot Mess' from his debut self-titled 2008 album were similarly catchy and crested the wave of synth-pop just before it flooded everywhere, and then in 2009 his feature on Basement Jaxx's Feelings Gone was just about my favourite song of the year. Maybe. Probably not. But it was up there. The Australian child actor now - although working with Adam Lambert - is faced with an alienating mainstream market. Unless he were to - I don't know - ride around Twitter calling Lady GaGa a cunt and then produce music videos

As, currently, the only X Factor alumnus that has resembled anything close to a popstar I can be arsed to support, Alexandra Burke is in quite a comfortable place here. There's the knowing acceptance that none of her music is ever going to have any artistic merit (as though that's a get-out-of-critics-free card), but with every decent single there comes the tiny thought at the back of my head: "hey, she's not JLS". As one of the X Factor's harshest critics I should know better than to support any of its products, but something, whether it's her meltdown when performing with Beyoncé, or her general sense of humour and down-to-earth likeability (a world away from the bratty gurns of Cher Lloyd or the bland inoffensiveness of Leona Lewis), makes me feel quite comfortable listening to her. Plus 'All Night Long' was fantastic until Pitbull showed up. The release of 'Elephant' - this record's first single - though was a warning siren. Bur

Until I stumbled across the music video to 'I Feel Better' I seemed to view Hot Chip as something of a one-breakthrough-hit-per-album phenomenon. I'd only downloaded Ready for the Floor and Over and Over from them - admittedly both fantastic and seminal singles - but, through no other reason than sheer ignorance, never motivated me to listen further. 2010's One Life Stand then was something of a late awakening for me; a fantastic mix of smart, funny and personal electropop. When acts like HURTS and La Roux are dominating the genre with die-hard serious faces and cold, brash aesthetics, it's quite refreshing to see acts injecting humour and personality. For their fifth album, then, Hot Chip have few challenges left ahead of them. With such consistency there's always the fear of failure to please, but the band seem to have garnered a reputation that so few current British acts seem to achieve with Pitchfork and the rest of the international critical press.

In my first year of college I found my We'll Live and Die in these Towns CD and decided that I was in love with it again. The title track in particular was a deliciously-written and bluntly obvious motivator for me to study and break out of a rut of a town, and it made the band stand out for me from the massively-populated crowd of indeterminable indie nonsense. Whilst the Pigeon Detectives, Viva Brother and Editors have all but faded away, a great collective of other bands from the same breakthrough period have undergone massive stylistic changes: the Maccabees went folk earlier this year, the View have upped their game and Hard-Fi are almost unrecognisable. With the Enemy, though, their third studio album offers no such surprises. The Enemy opt for the first route. To a tedious degree. I cannot form sentences to express the severity of my boredom and disappointment with this album. It is a waste of your/my time. It's 12 repetitive songs. It's the Enemy.

When Sandie Shaw sang about a puppet on a string in 1967 it seemed highly unlikely that there'd ever be a day when a band named after a lesbian sex act would enjoy #1 hits and albums in the United Kingdom. And yet, even from their debut album, the band have continued to bother UK charts with their risqué music videos and flamboyant sounds. Whether it was the photograph of Peter Reed's arse or a lack of mainstream pop songs, 'Night Work' was the band's first album not to top the charts. Then again, we have Eminem to blame, so no shame there. There is the worrying fear that the band have now become an alternative disco pop outlet. Sure, album #4 earned a #4 place over here but that was behind the rather unexciting Paloma Faith, Gary Barlow and Rumer. Their earlier sound of quirky, infectious Elton John derivatives has made way for hands-in-the-air electropop and whilst there've still been some fantastic moments - the Ian McKellen verse on Invisible Light - t

When 'Sweet Disposition' came out there was a quiet buzz in the little alternative music world that thought the track would enjoy some success that songs like Bombay Bicycle Club's Always Like This or Empire of the Sun's We are the People were enjoying in the same year. All excellent, visceral and catchy songs, all from too-unknown bands to chart highly. 3 years on, though, and the track's taken a life of its own. Soundtracking (500) Days of Summer, adverts for Diet Coke, Sky Sports, Toyota and Center Parcs, and trailers for Ted and Eat Pray Love, the song is inescapable. This week it re-entered the UK charts at #26. The band are now on Coldplay and Snow Patrol levels of gooey-romantic soundtrack omnipresence. The problem with that, of course, is that it's just one song. The rest of their debut album Conditions was largely forgettable. None of their other tracks are likely to be covered on The Voice any time soon. So it's down to their follow-up to re

Artists professing their admiration for the field in which they work, particularly in the world of music, can often be nauseating. From the New Seekers' endeavours to Teach the World to Sing to ABBA's Thank You For the Music there's been a vast range of celebratory moments that, whilst fantastic tunes, are rather cruelly mocked for their reverie and optimism. Particularly recently, in a world where James Blake and Ed Sheeran are somehow successful for their soul-crushingly bleak and poignant lyricism, the need for pop has been quite shunned. Their eighth album - their first studio release in 7 years - comes fresh off the back of the pop maestros rereleasing their older material. Perhaps Words and Music... could be said to be the end product of a night's drunken reminisces, a fond rose-tinted glimpse of the past and a generous dollop of self-exploration.  Because the album opens with a spoken introduction, 'Over the Border', over some rather distance

Seeing Faith in her numerous TV appearances since the release of 2009's Do You Want the Truth or Something Beautiful? was a bit of a culture shock. That a woman who injects so much tragedy and romance into her lyrics, wistful melancholy into her melodies and humility into her vocal performance could come across as she did in her Never Mind the Buzzcocks guest slots was quite surreal. It cemented her, however, as one of the nation's true eccentrics and her ditsy, zany sense of humour - much like Adele's talking voice - rather covers the best of both worlds (captivating performance and enigmatic chat show slots). Her 2009 breakthrough was a little slow for me. Whilst she definitely enjoyed poppier moments and hits with Stone Cold Sober and Upside Down for me the real masterstroke of the album was the other single, New York . A fantastically poignant and wrought vocal, it was one of the year's best-written and most beautiful tracks for me. Here Faith gets a coup

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For me, the All-American Rejects are walking around the beach listening to 'The Last Song' and 'Swing Swing' on my first iPod. Their whole teenage powerpop thing never wholly translated this side of the Atlantic in the same way that, say, Fall Out Boy, 30 Seconds to Mars or My Chemical Romance did. Stateside, though, they've only grown and grown in pop success - culminating in the #4 Billboard position for Gives You Hell from their 2009 album, When the World Comes Down . Working this time around with Greg Wells - the man who produced Katy Perry's career-high Waking Up in Vegas , OneRepublic's Apologize and Mika's 2007 debut album Life in Cartoon Motion , it'll be interesting to see how their forray into the popworld goes (at least musically, since statistically they've charted quite disappointingly - singles-wise at least). Let's face it, with a face (and body... *contains myself* ) like Tyson Ritter's, the band are going to con

Forgive me whilst I reminisce but it doesn't really seem that long ago that the trailers for the TV series Skins were coming into the fray, soundtracked by Standing in the Way of Control and launching the Washington trio into the heights of mid-2000s indie coolness. Their singer Beth Ditto topping the NME's Cool List for 2006 and generating more than enough publicity through her interviews, appearance and that Rolling Stone cover, the band really seemed to be going places. Their 2009 effort, Music for Men , however, was met with little more than a damp squib, peaking at #18 in the UK. Thus, the band have done what all mainstream pop/rock bands should do - work with Xenomania's Brian Higgins. The music production powerhouse behind virtually all of Girls Aloud's hits, Cher's Believe and the greatest band of all time: Mini Viva. Not exactly a massive boost to their indie credentials and I honestly thought Xenomania had done more to warrant such a good reputati

I should probably warn you straight away that every bone in my body urges me to react to Keane's music with shrieks, involuntary spasms and spitting. Sure, they had a couple of cute songs in Bedshaped , Somewhere Only We Know and Bad Dream but ever since 2009 the band have taken on this mantle of becoming a Killers tribute band, aiming for the safe-as-houses synthrock niche about as lazily and clumsily as a drunk uncle making a beeline for the bridesmaids at a wedding. Spiralling was okay. But the rest, especially that EP they did with the single with K'Naan, have just made me wretch and plot more creative suicides. I know it's quite typical for alternative music outlets to tear the band to pieces, especially in light of this record being their fifth #1 album, but I can't effectively label myself as an enduring hater: I own Hopes and Fears on CD and enjoyed Under the Iron Sea even more, but I don't know - maybe there is an element of immaturity and uncool

With Animal Collective, this band sat atop this list of hipster recommendations that went right over my head until this year, where, upon the release of Myth and my immediate fondness for it, I decided to give Teen Dream and Devotion a proper chance. Thus very much a latecomer to the hypewagon, I feel almost unworthy or unsuitable to review them, given how my mind could switch by this time next year. To the rest of the world at least, Alex Scally and Victoria Legrand, a French/Baltimore duo, are already on their fourth album. Niece, of course, to the legendary Michel, there's very much an immediate sense of orchestral songwriting about the duo's work and the use of increasingly varied sounds and instruments give them a surprisingly (given the number of bandmembers) full acoustic. Beginning with one of the sunniest and brightest guitar pieces in 'Myth' that you'll hear all year, the track is pure dreampop bliss that ably rivals M83's Hurry Up, We

The 2010 release of 'Crazy for You' sort of passed me by. I guess, being British, the amount of Califawning presented in their music and style was a little hard to relate to this side of the Atlantic, and if anything that's represented more obviously this time around. The album was wonderfully fun and uplifting, though, and the whole indie-pop duo with a summery vibe shtick continues to be a crowdpleaser. Bobb Bruno and Bethany Cosentino might look the part with their glasses and their cool band tees, but the one thing that's a barrier between idle appreciation and full-blown embrace of the band is that, since their breakthrough, so many other bands have come and gone with debuts far more enticing and eyecatching. Cults, Cat's Eyes, Yuck, Grouplove, the Smith Westerns and Foster the People all grabbed my attention with far more lo-fi indie gusto than this whole laidback Californian dream-pop in under-3-minute bursts thing. Still, Cosentino's guest appea