January Singles Round-Up

It's now traditional that the music world agrees a ceasefire in December, allowing X-Factor hangers-on free reign to ride roughshod over the charts. A few (usually futile) infiltration attempts aside, most realise it's just easier that way. Let Cowell have his fun, because January sees things return to something resembling normality in terms of singles releases.

Not that considerations of the calendar bother Ash any more, now that they are taking the tag 'singles band' to worryingly literal extremes. Space Shot is the eighth in their 26 single series. It has their typical monster chorus and languid delivery, but really it's a shadow of the band that thrilled me years ago.

Far more endearing is Ben Dalby's impressively crafted Doctor Can. It's an absorbing piece of bass-led songsmithery which is just a little bit 80s although mercifully not in that horribly contrived La Roux way. Arno Cost flies in the face of Dalby's conciseness with his remix of Cicada's One Beat Away. Nicely textured electro it may be, but there's no need whatsoever for it to exceed seven minutes.

A one-two of local singles provides a doubly pleasant surprise. Hartlepool band Runwells’ As You Begin is the purest, simplest type of guitar pop. It‘s easygoing, catchy, and strangely moreish. Revelation number two comes from Longbenton's Nev Clay whose song Tony Robinson's Tears is a breezy, charming exercise in modern folk which recounts the tale of a particularly absorbing episode of Time Team. Nev has the sort of authenticity Paolo Nutini would slay his granny for. I'm sure you don't need me to tell you, but Nutini's 10/10 is a derisory lump of ironically-titled shite which sees him for some inexplicable reason pretending to be Jamaican. Hadouken are equally impossible to take seriously as their faux-everything, Sub-Skins drivel-fest Turn the Lights Out hammers another nail in their coffin. Winter Kiss by Young Guns is no better, as a bunch of rock kids from High Wycombe attempt to disguise their place of birth with generic phony American rawk mewling.

The antithesis to this posey horror comes in the form of Mixtapes and Cellmates' Soon and Victorian English Gentlemen's Club's Bored in Belgium. The former represents that gorgeously melodic and vaguely shoegazey pop the Swedes always do excellently. The latter is a quirky, playful line in yelping indie-pop. Both are excellent, and head and shoulders above much of the rest of January's offerings.