Charles Kraus: This week's new singles

Sunday, January 30, 2011

This week's new singles

PICK OF THE WEEK

The Streets
Going Through Hell (679)

At some point Mike Skinner ? the most important British act of the last decade ? went from lager-soaked teller of nightclub tale to a sweet-eyed, hungover-looking Nassim Nicholas Tassib-like pop epistemologist. What does it all mean? Part of it, he explains alongside the Music's Rob Harvey (seemingly played by ex-QPR man Gavin Peacock) is to keep ruddy going. All done with a dog-fighting analogy: "It's not the size of the dog in the fight but the fight in the dog," he barks.

ALSO OUT THIS WEEK

Kim Ann Foxman
Creature (mr.intl)

Accessorised with a video so stylish that its art director's surname is Prada, this solo effort by one prong of Hercules And Love Affair (H&LA man Andrew Butler also co-writes) is a delicate piece of minimal-ish disco-influenced electronica. You'll hear it when entering the kind of clothes shop that needs an Amex Centurion to get past the door. But you'd like it.

Barbarellas
Body Rock (Ceol)

This should be meat and drink for the snide music hack (*shifts uneasily*). It is half of B*Witched doing a spatchcocked Lady Gaga impression based on the guitar riff from The Flight Of The Conchords' theme with hollow vocals about dancing. It ought to be worse than a BBC News Westminster OB without omnipresent current affairs jackal Laura Kuenssberg. But it's actually rather good, Barbarella's Edele Lynch being a former Xenomania writer after all. A lesson in curbing your cynicism.

Enrique Iglesias feat Ludacris
Tonight (I'm Fucking You) (Polydor)

Enrique! Honestly! Is the smouldering sensitive sexpot of Hero really reduced to using the language of the school yard? (Where his pa and Paul Simon used to hang.) Obviously, Tonight has been censored for the radio, to the maladroit "loving you". You've got to admire the bluntness. Delivered over a tragic provincial chain vodka bar blip, 'Rique proffers, "Please excuse me, I don't mean to be rude, but tonight I'm fucking you," to some lucky young lass. Who's to blame? It could be Ludacris, a man who, lest we forget, once posed on an album sleeve seasoning a woman's leg as it protruded from a family-sized chicken bucket. Bailamos!

Drop The Lime
Hot As Hell (Ministry Of Sound)

Sweet Gene Vincent! What's this? Drop The Lime, erstwhile NYC house producer Luca Venezia, is usually a dropper of bangers as well as citrus fruits. But last year he founded his own rockabilly group Bad Lupo Grande and his two genres have seeped together in the wash like red socks and a wifebeater vest to make Hot As Hell ? the world's first rockabilly/techno crossover hit. It sort of works, with Luca (Tom Hardy playing a Vauxhall gay club bouncer) dropping twanging guitars and harmonicas over some big room beats. On the other hand he's mixed rockabilly and techno. Which is less having his cake and eating it and more making his bed and pissing it.

Will Dean

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