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, JAIME GILL puts the microscope up to SUGABABES, THE GOSSIP, AIR, THE NOISETTES, MODEST MOUSE and JAY-Z.

After eleven years as famed purveyors of sleek, sophisticated pop, it sounds like SUGABAES (pictured) have suddenly soured from French champagne into a 2 for 1 alcopop bought in a Romford off licence. Blame the disappointing performance of their last album, blame the rise of trashy rivals like The Saturdays or blame the ‘Babes themselves, but "HEY SEXY" is as cheap, tacky and desperate as its title suggests. And yes, it's evilly catchy and sticks to your brain like gum to a shoe, but the bull-in-a-china-shop production and bully-in-a-sex-shop lyrics are uniquely awful. Ironically enough, the least sexy thing they've ever done.

While THE GOSSIP will probably never release a song quite as interesting, smart or original as their frontwoman, their "sod indie" disco pop can still hit the sweet spot. Built on little more than a sweetly melancholic piano riff which echoes Candi Staton, Beth Ditto belts out the slap-around-the-face chorus of "LOVE LONG DISTANCE" with her usual gutsy gusto. The splendidly silly, kitschy video only adds to the package.



If you're in your 30s, this next fact is going to make you feel closer to a thousand: astoundingly, AIR are about to release their fifth record, eleven years after "Moon Safari" became the soundtrack to practically every dinner party and Channel 4 programme of the day. After the gloomy "Pocket Symphony" album, new single "SING SANG SUNG" is a return to the lounge-electronica of that debut, all narcotic Moogs and fluttery vocals. So slender and lightweight it constantly threatens to drift free of your stereo, but quite lovely nonetheless.

Just as lovely, but rather more substantial, is THE NOISETTES' "WILD YOUNG HEARTS", the deftest, breeziest, best song of the week, with its ‘60s sashay and ducking and diving melody. The beat skips along with the joyful lightness of a six-year-old on a summer street, while the outstanding Shingai Shoniwa delivers a terrifically assured vocal that fuses Mama Cass, Billie Holliday, Eartha Kitt and a sober Amy Winehouse to create something uniquely herself. What's the story? Motown glory.

Poor old Johnny Marr. How did he go from being co-architect of a perfectly named, utterly original band with one of the best frontmen and smartest lyricists in pop history, to man-stood-in-the- background for the distinctly ordinary, horribly named MODEST MOUSE? And yes, it must be irksome for the rest of the band that (in the UK, at least) so much attention is paid to their second guitarist, but if they will insist on releasing songs as lumpen and uninteresting as "SATELLITE SKIN" what else is there to talk about? Well, the beautiful, Heath Ledger-directed video to the also recently issued "King Rat" is worth checking-out, admittedly.

Let's finish up with a good old fashioned hip hop spectacular, in the shape of the new single from JAY-Z. "RUN THIS TOWN" is actually fairly pedestrian - a sludgy beat, a phoned-in rap and a cheesegrater of a chorus from Rihanna - but the mega-budget, gloriously nonsensical video is thoroughly entertaining. Guerrilla chic incomprehensibly fused with medieval imagery, Rihanna looking glorious in a ninja mask and garter, Kanye West, thousands of extras looking completely confused about where they are or what they're doing: Mr Z might as well have titled this one "Up Yours, Recession!"