Eoin Butler'sguide to singles, downloads and free audiostreams
KITTY, DAISY & LEWIS
Going Up the Country
Sunday Best
****
These annoyingly talented teenage rockabillies (the progeny of former Raincoats drummer Indgid Weiss) hold the unlikely distinction of having appeared recently in both the pages of Vogueand on an episode of Blue Peter. This version of the old Canned Heat number mercifully dispenses with the original's lengthy recorder solos.
JOHNNY FLYNN
Brown Trout Blues
Vertigo
***
Here's an up-and-coming London singer-songwriter whose hip status may have been hurt slightly by the revelation that he is a stepbrother of Jerome Flynn (of godawful mid-1990s balladeers Robinson & Jerome). Oh, the shame . . .
HERCULES & LOVE AFFAIR
You Belong
DFA Records
***
Includes the now obligatory (in this genre at least) contribution from Mercury Prize-winning warbler-for-hire Antony Hegarty. The man really can emote on demand, can't he?
DOUG WALKER
Obstacles
Warner
**
Doug Walker is a sort of breakfast-TV Chris Martin, whose romantic fortunes, according to this song, are continually hampered by certain unidentified "obstacles". Just a hunch, now, but one of those may include his tortuously overwrought sentence construction.
"I know that you know that we can make it through/But I see that you see a way for us/I am believing that you know in your heart the way/I don't understand."
Seriously Douggy, Ferdinand Magellan would have gotten lost on that first line alone. And that's just the chorus.
THE SATURDAYS
If This Is Love
Polydor
New five-piece girl band, two of whom used to be S Club Juniors and another of whom speaks with an Irish accent. (That's Una Healy, who was until recently a Dublin singer-songwriter and model). For more information, try elsewhere.
PRIMAL SCREAM
Can't Go Back
B-Unique **
"I can't go back to the place I was before," claims Scream frontman Bobby Gillespie. That's the same Bobby Gillespie, incidentally, whose quarter-century career trajectory has seen his band gleefully zigzag from traditional Byrds and Stones-influenced rock to cutting-edge dance/rock hybrids and back many times already, whilst always paying homage to the oldest and most hackneyed rock'n'roll conventions. Crazy fool.
