Girls
Honey Bunny (Fantasy)
Girls have had a good crack at being both difficult to Google and a decent present-day Beach Boys. Clocking it at a frantic 2 minutes 34 seconds, Honey Bunny is so abundantly happy that I want to jump in and swim around in it, washing my face with all its joy. There's surf guitar! There's a red herring mournful middle eight! There's a chorus that's catchier than Peter Schmeichel's hands! Also enjoyable is the video, which looks like VBS.tv directed an advert for Babybel, and features singer Christopher Owens wearing a quality purple sunglasses/cowboy boots combo that makes him look uncannily like a man-Ke$ha.
Matt Cardle
Run For Your Life (Sony)
Try as it might, all Run For Your Life does is set itself up for the inevitable title-based joke. If this song was a fictional animal, it would be Fox from Animals Of Farthing Wood. Weighed down by its own po-facedness and a misguided sense of social importance, it reluctantly assumes responsibility for a motley crew of lyrics and power chords. Although it tries valiantly to lead them across the road, it gets stuck firmly in the middle, never to cross.
James Vincent McMorrow
We Don't Eat (Vagrant)
Meanwhile, James Vincent McMorrow (if he gets to use all his names, then I'm using all mine too – from now on I'm Ailbhe Mary Elizabeth Malone, and demand to be addressed as such) does exactly what Matt Cardle wishes he could do. If Matt is Fox, then James is Aslan. Wise, humble and hopeful, We Don't Eat showcases McMorrow's sorrowful baritone range, with lyrics that question what it is to be a man, and the importance of patience.
Björk
Moon (One Little Indian)
I don't have an iPad or an iPhone, so I imagine I'm missing out on the main bit of this. Instead, I'd like to think that the Moon app is a way to learn to speak like Björk. The way she says "lukewarm" is so delicious that it made me hear the next line as "goats" rather than "gods" and I am now not really sure what's going on in the song. But the harp riff which runs through it is striking. It waxes and wanes and pulls and pushes, like the moon on the tide.
Deerhoof Feat Jeff Tweedy
Behold A Racoon In The Darkness (Polyvinyl)
This is the fourth release from Deerhoof's seven-inch project, where a guest vocalist sings over an instrumental track from the San Franciso band's latest album, Deerhoof Vs Evil. Though the melody and instrumentals haven't been changed from the original, Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy's voice is so comforting, and so reasonable, that he makes this psychy cut sound like something off Balamory. The fact that his teenage son Spencer Tweedy contributes backing vocals moves things from the realm of amiable to adorable.
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