Singles & Downloads 12

Hip-hop soul, chart rave and Balearic beach-pop with a 1990s flavour, synthesiser-led space-rock, a localised Goth-electronic revolution, Kenyan Kamba beats, an eccentric attempt at bringing opera into pop, and vibrations from dubstep's deep roots. As ever, theartsdesk's singles round-up takes you round the houses, up some dead-end alleys, down the docks and along sweeping avenues you never knew existed, hopefully dropping you home exhausted but happy with a selection of strange and evocative new music in your pockets. We aim to please.

Aloe Blacc, I Need a Dollar (Epic)

The potential breakthrough song from Californian hip-hop soul singer Aloe Blacc comes on like a sassy, bastard grandson to Sam Cooke's 1960 classic "Chain Gang". It has the same folk-song rhythm, masculine backing chants, and earnest but underplayed sense of injustice. It is, however, also a very modern creature. "I Need a Dollar" was written by Blacc when he was made redundant and it's a simply told tale of there being no work, no money and the possibility of escaping into the bottle when "everything around me is falling down and all I want is someone to help me". It would be great if the 10 million YouTube views translated into something more concrete since Blacc is a socially concerned individual whose attitude and music are the antithesis of, say, "Where Them Girls At?", the new single from French Euro-cheese kingpin David Guetta (featuring Flo Rida and Nicki Minaj for tediously calculated American hip-hop glam). Blacc's song, rather than going the bling and circuses route, is observational pop that acknowledges the ongoing global financial shitstorm but will also appeal to the Plan B demographic and old Motown fans. It's a major-label opening salvo that sets out his stall in proud style. (THG)

• Find "I Need a Dollar" on Amazon

Watch the video for "I Need a Dollar"

The Stepkids, Shadows on Behalf/ La La (Stones Throw)

Usually musical projects by seasoned session musicians are the most intensely boring thing on the planet - all accomplishment over inspiration. But here, former sidemen for the likes of Alicia Keys and 50 Cent have decided to use their powers for good, recreating the brief flash in the 1970s when soul music felt genuinely utopian. Think Minnie Ripperton's "Les Fleurs", think The Supremes doing "Let the Sunshine In" from Hair, and then add an extra layer of sophistication, some free-jazz galactic exploration and warm analogue recording glow. It's melodic, it's warm, it's utterly ridiculous, but it's as gorgeous a sound as you'll hear this month, so here's to rich men's follies. (JM)

• Find "Shadows on Behalf"/ "La La" on Amazon
• Download "Shadows on Behalf"/ "La La" on iTunes

Austra, Lose It (Domino)

The history of the operatic vocal's involvement in pop music is a stone that only the brave sonic explorer should overturn. Shakespeare's Sister's "Stay" is one of the more famous examples, or how about Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballé's epic "Barcelona"? Both are bombastic, over-emotive schmaltz-fests - well, it is opera, innit. Austra, however, have nailed something more interesting. I'll admit that on first hearing their album I dismissed it out of hand for its vocal foibles, but I was foolish. Coming back to this song, it reveals itself as eccentric dance-pop, as if La Roux had been a twitchy Sarah Brightman acolyte rather than a Heaven 17-loving folkie. It's over rather than under-produced which, for once, works in the song's favour. Austra are a Canadian trio, led by one Katie Stelmanis, and they've hit a new electropop niche which, given the ubiquitousness of electropop, is quite a feat. (THG)

• Find "Lose It" on Amazon

Chase and Status, Time featuring Delilah

There's a whole strain of rave-pop scampering around the charts at the moment – Katy B, Magnetic Man, Toddla T – that looks back to the early 1990s, yet sounds like nothing that actually came out back then: a kind of fuller exploration of certain possibilities that were never realised at the time. Chase and Status's “Blind Faith” was one such track, and this is another. In many ways it sounds like a standard moody mid-tempo pop song in the modern style, but the rave breakbeats give it an extra layer of drama on top of the lyrics about relationship paralysis and “fucking suffocating”. You wouldn't need the accompanying domestic violence-themed video to find it harrowing, but as grim songs go, it's pretty engaging, and a bonus in the download single release of an absolutely staggering drum'n'bass mix by Wilkinson ramps up the drama tenfold. (JM)

• Find "Time" on Amazon
• Download"Time" on iTunes

Watch the video for "Time"

Gazelle Twin, I Am Shell I Am Bone/ The Eternal (Anti-Ghost Moon Ray)

Brighton's Goth-electronic revolution continues apace with the second single from Elizabeth Walling, a young woman who only ever appears onstage dressed like an abject spectre from a Quay Brothers animation. "I Am Shell I Am Bone" is doomed and mournful, kind of like Fever Ray but with added thumpy layers of Mogadon industrial clatter. It doesn't sound much like anything else around and, whether you like it or not, and I do, it opens the door to intriguing possible varieties of clouded ambient gloom-pop. As if that weren't enough, she rams the point home by including an echoing spooked cover of Joy Division's "Eternal" as the B-side. Watch this one. (THG)

• Find "I Am Shell I Am Bone" on Anti-Ghost Moon Ray Records

J:Kenzo, The Roteks/ Protected (Tempa)

DJ Cable and Fused Forces/ dCult, Yoshimitsu/ Drunken Master (Triangulum)

Dubstep by its nature is a mongrel form, but if there is such a thing as a purist version, these two releases exemplify it. While you may know the sound best for its more fizzy, radio-oriented forms, at root it is something that only works on big, well-made loudspeakers: it is not something to be skipped through while you listen on your iPod's little white buds, but requires rooting in time and place. A wiseass once said: “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” and this is architecture you can dance to, its slow tempo allowing the creation of wide open spaces which the listener can inhabit, even as the rhythms encourage them to move. J:Kenzo's tracks are the most monumental here, great slugs of bass, dramatic pauses and swooping high-end effects pulling you from hefty drumbeat to hefty drumbeat, in complete contrast to previous models of dance music that hurry you along. The DJ Cable and Fused Forces/ dCult tracks on new label Triangulum are far more rarefied, creating elegant frameworks of crisp electronic sound, but still with infra-deep bass notes pulsing throughout giving the whole thing a sense of disorienting scale, making it both womb-like and threatening. Both are entirely filmic, working like ambient music in the truest sense to create dark drama around you. If your speakers are good enough, of course. (JM)

• Find "The Roteks"/ "Protected" on Amazon
• Download "The Roteks"/ "Protected" on iTunes
• Find "Yoshimitsu"/ "Drunken Master" on Amazon
• Download "Yoshimitsu"/ "Drunken Master" on iTunes

Listen to "Drunken Master"

Nguuni Lovers Lovers, Cheza Ngoma (Dream Beach)

As if in direct response to reading Howard Male's recent debate-starting opinion piece on theartsdesk about how the term "world music" had served its purpose and is now out of date, indie label Moshi Moshi has set up a new label Dream Beach "to get... people who are into indie and punk music to listen to African and non-Western music". It's run by Eddy Frankel of the band Fair Ohs and he wants to avoid what he calls "the World music cliché". If the results are all going to be as jolly and catchy as this debut single, we should pay attention. Nguuni Lovers Lovers hail from Kenya and play a style called Kamba. That's as may be but their euphoric twangy treble guitars and poppy tunes remind me of the Bhundu Boys, a brilliant 1980s Zimbabwean group whose gigs were a grin-inducing riot of fun. That probably marks me out as a layman who doesn't know his jit from his chimurenga but, hell, now world music's dead, who cares, we can all just dig it without the nit-picking trainspotting. (THG)

• Find "Cheza Ngoma" on Amazon

Errors, Magna Encarta/ Ganymede (Rock Action)

It's odd there's not really a name for indie rock led by electronic instruments rather than guitars, given how much of it there is. Anyway, this is some of it, from Glasgow, and it's terrific. If you know Mogwai, the fact it's on their label should hint at how hypnotic, dramatic and sparklingly produced it is, and if not you can take our word for it. These two tracks each take a riff and extemporise on it, not unlike the 1980s band Spacemen 3 (perhaps better known as precursors to Spiritualized) but perhaps slightly less narcotically-oriented and with more of a sense of unfolding narrative. (JM)

• Find "Magna Encarta"/ "Ganymede" on Amazon
• Download "Magna Encarta"/ "Ganymede" on iTunes
  

For the sake of full disclosure I should say that I have known DJ-producer Chris Coco for many years. He used to be my boss, once upon a time, and I have a hefty affection for him. I should also point out, though, that I have never consequently felt duty bound to rave about his musical output. Indeed, I was not very keen in print on his band City Reverb. Chris is Mr Balearic as is his pal, the Ibiza-bound DJ Pete Gooding. Balearic, as a musical mood, can often be a recipe for disaster, a beachside guilty-pleasures party where, God help us, Chris Rea and Phil Collins are suddenly cool. With "Believe", however, the duo have created a bona fide Balearic pop classic, harking back to the early-Nineties Ibiza golden age of songs such as A Man Called Adam's "Barefoot in the Head". It's loping golden-sunshine music, lazy and lovely, with a drowsy vocal by Peter Coyle who was briefly an Eighties pop star as half of the Lotus Eaters (anyone remember "The First Picture of You"?). There are mixes, of which the spaced breakbeat of Russian producer Volta Cab is the best, but the original captures an ecstastic chilled glow that's seldom been nailed so deliciously in recent years. (THG)