The Gaslight Anthem
Here Comes My Man (Mercury)
The best moments on the Gaslight Anthem's somewhat patchy current album Handwritten are those in which they step outside their established template of (admittedly invigorating) garage-rattling, throat-parching rock'n'roll. This is one of those. Brian Fallon delivers it, audaciously and convincingly, from the perspective of what appears to be a long-suffering woman wearied of waiting for some vainglorious musician to pull himself together, while behind him this fine band perform a plausible impression of Spector doing Springsteen.
Dexys
Incapable Of Love (BMG Rights Management)
Like few albums in living memory, Dexys' much-ballyhooed One Day I'm Going To Soar benefited from a determination among critics of a certain age that it was going to be at least as great as they'd been insisting Dexys Midnight Runners always were during the preceding 27 years of silence. Incapable Of Love was the only dufferoo aboard, an oversung burlesque of the carping between a mutually disappointed couple, who – it's difficult to avoid thinking – deserve each other.
Bat For Lashes
All Your Gold (Parlophone)
A useful summary of the (many) virtues of Bat For Lashes' third album, The Haunted Man, which benefits immensely from shedding much of the aural frippery and recondite lyrical kookery which hitherto blighted too much of Natasha Khan's work. Soundtracked by a minimal backbeat tough to describe without recourse to the word "slinky", All Your Gold addresses some besotted, unwitting rube who is shortly to pay the price for the damage done by the previous idiot the narrator went out with.
Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs
Your Love (Polydor)
Densely wrought electronica caught between frantic exuberance and languid melancholy, evoking Hot Chip inasmuch as Hot Chip evoke Soul II Soul and New Order. Much of what is characterised as dance music – and, increasingly, pop music in general – gives the impression that its creators switched the machine on and then got distracted and wandered off, but TEED auteur Orlando Higginbottom has something of the obsessively tinkering boffin about him, which is always to be encouraged.
Paloma Faith
Never Tear Us Apart (RCA)
Another elderly pop hit covered by a presently fashionable artist to soundtrack an advertisement for a department store. So it's a bit like the story of Abraham on Mount Moriah, except with Ms Faith in the role of the Old Testament patriarch, John Lewis as God, and INXS's sweetly maudlin ballad as Isaac. The crucial and regrettable difference being that, in this case, the slaughter is permitted to proceed uninterrupted.
