God, The Lucksmiths have some clever turns of phrase. Some of the wittiest lyrics I've heard since Momus.

I wonder whether The Go! Team had heard any Girlsareshort, or whether the similarities in their sound (compare, for example, Huddle Formation to Karate Ninjas) and aesthetics (both have euphorically shouted vocals and refer to friendship as a theme) are coincidental. Perhaps there's some kind of genre centred around these elements?

A meme that has been floating around (via someone I don't know who had AIH in their list):

Find the number of listeners for each of your top 10 artists and add them up and divide by 10 to get the average.

1 Belle and Sebastian - 136,323 listeners
2 ninetynine - 127 listeners
3 The Field Mice - 5,109 listeners
4 Minimum Chips - 165 listeners
5 Jens Lekman - 20,127 listeners*
6 My Favorite - 4,367 listeners
7 The Softies - 4,566 listeners
8 Pipas - 3,047 listeners
9 Slowdive - 19,942 listeners
10 The Jesus and Mary…

I just picked up the Semifinalists' self-titled album, and I rather like it. It sounds like a mixture of New Buffalo, The Go! Team, Architecture In Helsinki and The Flaming Lips, with a layered, textured, almost shoegazer feel in places. And it doesn't seem to obviously rip off one or two influences, which is more than one can say for a lot of popular "indie" bands these days.

The special edition of the new Morrissey album (with bonus DVD and a rather small poster) just arrived in the mail.

Those who have seen the CD package will know that it is styled on classical records. However, only when you open it up do you notice that the disc itself is designed to look as much like a vinyl record as possible, black on the underside (like the old PlayStation CDs) and with vinyl-like ridges along the top (like the Verbatim Vinyl CD-Rs). Which was a rather nice touch. I suspect that only the limited-edition copies may have this.…

Every now and then, listening to one's music collection on shuffle, the player, entirely by coincidence, picks a track that goes perfectly with the track before it.

Now was just such a moment, with Hello Rain being followed by For No One. I must remember that combination for the next time I DJ.

Is there any difference between Nouvelle Vague's easy-listening/samba covers of new-wave/post-punk songs and Katie Melua's cover of that Cure song, other than the former having been made with a knowing layer of hipster/insider irony, and the latter being just a pop song homogeneised for shopping-mall consumption?

Then again, I also thought that Moloko were basically En Vogue for indiekids.

I'm listening to Last.fm Neighbour Radio right now; it just threw Like A Motorway at me. This is a rather long though quite good track, combining early-1990s 909/303-driven acid-house with a Kraftwerk-esque "motorik" aesthetic. Much like a journey down a motorway (or, indeed, an autobahn), this track moves along at speed, gradually bending and changing.

I'm wondering how many other tracks combine the motorik aesthetic with house music. Pacific 202 is the other one I can think of.

I wonder how long until today's krautrock-referencing punk-house artists like !!! and LCD Soundsystem combine these two elements, just waiting to…

This morning (well, last morning, though it's delayed by 11 hours when it gets here), 3RRR played Not Given Lightly. It was odd hearing the original after only having heard the Frente version. Certainly, the line "Oh how I wish you could be deep inside me" sounds entirely different when sung by Knox than when sung by the young Angie Hart.

Chris Knox certainly liked his '60s doo-wop/pure-pop stylings.

I've just written up a review of New Waver's new album, Neuters, and posted it to my blog, here.

An excerpt:

The songs? Well, it starts with an organ-driven version of You've Gotta Fight For Your Right To Party, which segues into an AC/DC cover titled Tea Break. There's a version of Erotica all about masturbation, a Jimmy Barnes tribute titled Middle Class Man; a version of Too Drunk To Fuck that proclaims that, without brain-deadening alcohol, the human race would die out, and a masterful take on Heroin, titled Prozac. And that old Depeche Mode…