A God-awful Small Affair

It's secretly every British DJ's dream to have a #1 single with their debut album, let's be honest. So the fact that Rudimental already have 2 off of this, and the album went straight to #1 too, suggests this is a very big thing indeed. 2013 seems to be a great year for fresh new dance and D'n'B talent: Disclosure, Duke Dumont and Naughty Boy are racking up chart-toppers like no tomorrow. Rudimental - real names Piers, Amir, Kesi and DJ Locksmith - have carved themselves into that most British of contemporary sounds that was rather brought to the UK charts by Mark Ronson; that brand of revamped Motown, given an urban edge and handed over to just about any current soulful pop singer. The problem is that such records as Mark Ronson's Versions or Plan B's Defamation of Strickland Banks , whilst certainly stylish and successful, lacked something in the way of versatility. The record kicks off with its moody, understated title track and a pub-organ back...

So the last in my trio of millenium-debutant indie giants' 2013 releases comes from my dearly-beloved Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Following in the wake of a spate of guest appearances ( Santigold's Go ; The Flaming Lips ; David Lynch )  and soundtracking ( The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo ; Where the Wild Things Are ), Karen O is faced with the gauntlet of presenting something fresh and exciting as a frontwoman 10 years down the line from their glorious debut. It's a little bit of a face-saving move, really, following the slightly failed attempts to become crossover artists with their poppier 2009 release It's Blitz! They may have been covered by Glee, but they weren't quite covered with sales. Still, the charts' loss is our gain. Album #4 finds the Yeahs embracing a wacky side, if that wasn't made abundantly clear by the terribly unappealing artwork. I'm trying to find positives but everything - the garish font, the weirdly plastic child, and that hair - jus...

When I was reviewing the Strokes' fifth LP earlier in the year, I was doing so whilst also getting into this. The thought crossed my mind that this, Bankrupt! , also a fifth album for a seasoned indie behemoth, was exactly what the Strokes were trying to sound like. Only, Phoenix wanted to do it well, and paid attention to it. Us Brits aren't terribly well versed in the Frenchmen, probably because of some channel-crossing tensions that always surface when it comes to sport, cuisine and war. 2009's Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix was really the first I'd heard of them, but even then it struggled and charted at a lowly #54 over here. Let us swiftly rectify that, then, by means of a glowing review. Fingers crossed. It seems strange really that Phoenix should stick to that whole 1980s new-wave revivalism since they helped usher it in in 2009, and there is a danger of the genre dying (much like chillwave at the moment) and leaving Bankrupt! irrelevant and dated. They do...

As a music videomaker, graphic artist and songwriter, there's definitely a touch of apprehension about delving into Woodkid's debut. The frenchman operates under that typically meaningless genre of "neofolk", and has already raised eyebrows with his smouldering, bombastic work on Lana Del Rey's Blue Jeans video, the pretty and sunkissed Teenage Dream video, and his very own WTF moment Run Boy Run . But there's definitely something beguiling there: his crooning voice sits somewhere between Antony Hegarty and David Byrne, and his attention to detail with the orchestral arrangements are often fancy and dizzying. Real name Yoann Lemoine, Woodkid's debut LP comes at slightly unfortunate timing. The commercial use of Run Boy Run , by today's standards, is so long gone now that it's rendered irrelevant. We therefore cannot expect success of Alex Clare proportions. But who cares about that? We start off quietly for Lemoine's tastes, where ...