alt-J
Tesselate (Infectious)
This week is a great week for anyone having sex, thinking about having sex, or just interested in the idea of sex and looking for evocative – if slightly technical – ways to describe it. alt-J have a song built around an anguished falsetto and a synonym for shagging that conjures images of kitchen tiling. It's actually a beguiling piece of seduction, but if you ever find yourself stumbling out of a club saying, "Til morning comes let's tessellate," you really need to look at yourself.
Delilah
Inside My Love (Atlantic)
After a few listens I'm guessing the "inside my love" of this song is not Delilah instructing her boyf to stop gardening in the rain. With her cover of the Minnie Riperton classic, this 21-year-old Brit takes the trembling passion of the original and replaces it with a job lot of dead-eared melisma before laying it carefully over a bed of moody sub-bass. Obviously intended to be all hot and tempestuous, it doesn't wash with this writer. Mainly because I had an unfortunate accident with some pruning shears in Cheltenham last summer.
David Guetta Feat Chris Brown and Lil Wayne
I Can Only Imagine (EMI)
What with all the necessary effort that goes into denouncing Chris Brown as an awful human being, there's been little time to slag him off for having a crap singing voice. It would be a shame, however, if that were always to remain the case. Here, despite all the effects slathered over his warbling by EDM overlord Guetta, Brown comes over like a hormonally deficient sales rep asking directions to the nearest B&Q. It's so bland, so lacking in distinction, that you could paint your shed with it. Or oil your pruning shears.
Cypress Hill & Rusko
Lez Go (Cooperative)
Dog shit and marmalade risotto. A post-Wimbledon soiree in Notting Hill. Your mother performing Ai No Corrida in a onesie with her new dancing instructor. Some combinations are too terrible to even contemplate. And 40-something stoner rappers x big-room dubstep x the drummer from Blink-182 is one such. I genuinely do not know for whom this unholy mash is intended, but I guess it's actually a substantial percentage of the global male teen population, otherwise some suit wouldn't have suggested doing it in the first place.
Richard Hawley
Down In The Woods (Parlophone)
When I hear the words "Richard Hawley", I imagine a man semi-preserved in pomade, picking a maudlin melody on his guitar and crooning about an ill-fated liaison in a charity shop. Whichever Richard Hawley that is, he's obviously in no way related to the grizzled, growling garage-rocking one behind this song. It's got three chords and a sexual euphemism that knocks the rest of this week's into a cocked hat. Rocking Richard Hawley, I'd follow you "down in the woods" any time, son.
