THIS SITE HAS BEEN ARCHIVED AND CLOSED.

As this round-up does, in fact, hark all the way back to the 20th of December it shouldn’t really masquerade as a week’s worth of tracks. But it can, so it will, and now it’s going to piss gold in your ears.

Gold, gold, gold, gold, gold!

Napoleon IIIrd
‘Snowball Fight at the OK Diner’
(click to read Kev Kharas’s full post)
How early did you wake up on the 25th of December? Christmas dreams fade with age as toys get too small for worn hands.

Ignoring the novelty holding sway over December charts, ‘Snowball Fight at the OK Diner’ is an alternative take on Gunfight At The OK Corral; a weary lament on the Olympic mediocrity of the festive period, finding a lonely figure lost for words at the absurdity of it all. It’s also a pop song, albeit a downbeaten one. The snowballs say so.

Download: Napoleon IIIrd - 'Snowball Fight at the OK Diner'

The Magnetic Fields
‘Too Drunk to Dream’
(click to read Kev Kharas’s full post)
Stephin Merritt suffers from a hearing problem called hyperacusis, a condition that causes any sound that’s louder than normal to feedback in his head, volume increasing in steps. The Magnetic Fields lynchpin presumably drew on his experience of this when writing and recording new album Distortion, submerged as it is by a wet weight of white noise.

Still though, one thing you can bank on with Merritt is a melody, a tune to whistle or hum, and that remains the case here. 'Too Drunk to Dream’ is, as you might imagine, a teetering, merry mess of a song that finds Merritt “shitfaced, now and forever!” as he bids to escape memories of an old flame. It’s the melody, though, that might take longer to leave you than than both those memories or the hangover.

Download: The Magnetic Fields - 'Too Drunk to Dream'

Johnny Foreigner
‘The End And Everything After’
(click to read Mike Diver’s full post)
Taken from their 10/10-rated Arcs Across The City mini-album (review), ‘The End And Everything After’ is a brilliant introduction to one of the UK’s most promising new rock acts, Johnny Foreigner.

With work on their debut album proper recently wrapped up in New York with producer Machine (whose previous credits include Fall Out Boy and Lamb of God), the Birmingham trio’s mix of Q And Not U and Cap’N Jazz wobble-punk and the immediacy of early Blur and Ash, along with some superbly unhinged girl/boy vocal histrionics, looks certain to woo the ears of Britain’s more discerning indie-rockers. The band hit the road in February alongside fellow tips for 2008, Los Campesinos!, so be sure to catch them live at your earliest convenience.

Download: Johnny Foreigner - 'The End And Everything After'

George Pringle
‘I’m Very Scared, Buster. Yes, At Last’
(click to read Sean Adams’s full post)
Not content with being at war with man and machine, this is a track to take into battle on one of those less than glamourous sick days. This is George sat at home surveying the room with a typewriter and macbook to hand and wanting to dance to her own private disco made of up of her contrary cocktail of of old 'n' new homespun minimalist techno and girl-group doo-woops.

Download: George Pringle – ‘I’m Very Scared, Buster. Yes, At Last’

Broken Records
‘If Eilert Lovborg Wrote a Song It Would Sound Like This’
(click to read Kev Kharas’s full post)
It can be hard to ‘sell’ something to time-pushed, attention-leaking listeners, especially when you come ‘round cold-calling talking up the virtues of “delirium-induced vocals” or “mild-mannered madness”. There’s nothing mad at all, really, about Scotland's Broken Records; emerging as they do with everything talked-up as ‘epic’, ‘anthemic’ or ‘huge’ ever since Arcade Fire swept into view with Funeral at the tail end of 2004.

The Edinburgh-based septet are certainly a grandiose and at times overwhelming proposition, especially taken in headphones; this particular artefact creeping with Balkan-Schmalkan string before trotting along at a wide, loping canter that breaks into a run for the, yes, chorus. When ‘If Eilert Lovborg Wrote a Song, It Would Sound Like This’ slows in the middle to fill its big lungs you know not much else can happen after the respite apart from the, yes, chorus again; but you will it on anyway.

Download: Broken Records – ‘If Eilert Lovborg Wrote a Song, it Would Sound Like This’