Music Blogs

Welcome to Yahoo! Music's whistle-stop guide to what's happening in music this week. Every seven days in Recommenders we check-out the latest tracks, downloads, leaks, links and video clips from the corners of every genre and let you know whether they're worth getting out of bed for. Today, CHRIS PARKIN puts the microscope up to THE TWANG, THE MACCABEES, WE WERE PROMISED JETPACKS, FRANZ FERDINAND, VV BROWN and LADY GAGA.

Rocking up pie-eyed on the BBC's Glasto coverage, Mike Skinner told his interviewer to "face it man, it's all over." He was talking about The Streets but he might so easily have been directing it at the trail of thinking-men's-geezers he's left (unintentionally) in his wake, like The Twang. Owing everything to Skinner, as well as Flowered Up and the questionable musical chops that entails, THE TWANG's only purpose is to instil a sense of belonging in drunk men who like to declare "we're getting Twang-ed up!" Rendering themselves utterly redundant, then, they forego even that on "BARNEY RUBBLE", a tuneless swagger down misery lane that ponders the trouble "wiv' women."

If ever class war erupted, however, we'd reluctantly take up pitchforks on behalf of The Twang, very possibly to prod THE MACCABEES' parents with. It's a shame because in spite of all their privilege there's a great deal to enjoy in the genteel, marching-band pop of "CAN YOU GIVE IT", a song with more guitar lines than a BT call centre and whose video exposition of cheese rolling is much closer to Mike Skinner's eccentric vision of Blighty than The Twang's.



Capturing the disappointment of life with much more piquancy than anyone else this week are WE WERE PROMISED JETPACKS. If it's not the name, which takes "Back To The Future" to task for giving us false hope, it's the bristling, tightly-wound "ROLL UP YOUR SLEEVES", which sounds a lot like Tommy Reilly's "Give Me A Call" by a band with more acne, more frustration and less financial backing (it sounds like it was recorded in a saucepan) who wouldn't mind hibernating until their youth is behind them ("Wake me when we're older," they plead). Ace, in other words.

We hate to say it, but FRANZ FERDINAND's youth is in the distant past now, which begs the question: why do they still sound like the very same four-piece who wanted to make girls dance? Still fantastique live, on acetate, or whatever it is they use these days, they appear to be entering their dotage - the twilight years when, in spite of best efforts, bands sound like they're attempting to recapture the flush of youth. On "CAN'T STOP FEELING" the still-loveable Scots add groovily parping Afro-synths, reminiscent of Konono No 1, but this welcome manifestation only bookends their Franz Pop tm rather than transforms it.

The latest from that "other" 2009 lady-pop hopeful VV BROWN (pictured) eschews the punky bubblegum soul and lairy doo-wop that has made her stick so hard thus far. Instead, what could be her biggest hit, "SHARK IN THE WATER", is tuff, clenched-fist femme-pop of the highest order, laden with such sharp hooks that the blustery, unsubtle nature of it can be excused.

Less subtle still is Stepford Wife LADY GAGA, a woman, lest we forget, who shot fireworks out of her breasts at Glasto. Everyone you meet will declaim how disgusting she is and yet the entire population of the western world can't help but admire her gumption, propensity for corsets, Madonna boob tubes, her way with ice-cold electro and her unabashed enjoyment of bling - she's like the window on our souls. "PAPARAZZI" is perhaps the weakest of her singles, though, let down by her attempting a mildly slushy morality tale when her skill is showing us all up for the immoral idiots we all are.