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, KEV KHARAS puts the microscope up to MAPS, MADONNA, JOY ORBISON, AIR FRANCE, DRAKE and SPEECH DEBELLE.

James Chapman's MAPS have always charted strange, new terrain, and his new single is no different. A lucidly mangled mix of Spiritualized, LCD Soundsystem and The Farm's "All Together Now", "I DREAM OF CRYSTAL" finds elegance through the cocktail of "pills and gin" it stuffs down its neck; victorious, movie-score synths providing an epicness that jars neatly against what is essentially a tale of one man's descent into his own creepy madness.

Since its launch in the ‘80s, the career of MADONNA (pictured) has basically abided by two rules. The first dictates that she must continue to hijack new pop-cultural fads approximately seven minutes before Mrs Dave Jones (29, of Barnstaple) is made aware of them, thus feeding the myth that she's in some way visionary or trailblazing. The second, more simply, is that "sex sells". New single "CELEBRATION"'s faith in those two key tenets is unwavering - recalling Robert Miles' "Children" mashed into "Sunchyme" by Dario G, it satisfies the zeitgeist's current lust for late ‘90s nostalgia and it still thinks its sex can sell, though Yahoo! Music is not sure who to, or for how long. You suspect that even when Madge broaches her ‘80s she'll still be stuck in some silver hinterland, robotically brandishing her tired crotch in our tired faces.



Give this ears and it'll turn them Midas-gold. The peculiarly vertical rise of JOY ORBISON's "HYPH MNGO" has been a joy to behold in itself, as the producer - a nephew of drum'n'bass hero Ray Keith - has seen his debut release welcomed almost universally. Hailed by Pitchfork as a "dubstep anthem in the making" and by NME as "the first true anti-dubstep bass anthem", its silky blend of that dance style with house and UK garage is confounding; its hypnotic, wordless refrain introducing rave's past to shining rave futures.

Like Maps, AIR FRANCE's latest work - a "love letter in three parts" to the duo's home city, comprising of a video, psycho-geographical text and the song itself - is all about the synths, laying unashamed pop hooks down in a fizzing blanket of Balearic bliss and electronic alchemy. Air France are always fantastic, and unlike Maps they don't seem to need pills or gin to get high; "GOTHENBURG BELONGS TO ME" giddy and so summer even as the seasons turn against us.

Aubrey ‘DRAKE' Graham is a rapper on the rise - he may never have charted this side of the pond, but to date his smash single "Best I Ever Had" has been downloaded over one million times. Big business. Signed to Lil Wayne's Young Money Entertainment label, the Toronto-born hype magnet releases his debut EP "SO FAR GONE" in the US this week - expect it to destroy the charts there and make its way over here before the arrival of debut album "Thank Me Later" on Valentine's Day next year.

SPEECH DEBELLE's follow-up to her recent success is bright and breezy enough, "SPINNIN'"'s production light on clutter, leaving plenty of room for 26-year-old Corynne Elliot's amiable south London flow. But there's no escaping the absence of bite in those lyrics - the track feels kind of pointless and too polite, its chorus making the not-so-profound observation that: "The world keeps spinning, changing the lives of people in it / Nobody knows where it will take us, but I hope it gets better." It's the kind of inanity you'd expect from a phone advert, not a Mercury Prize winner.