SCUM
Amber Hands (Mute)
This glorious four-minute dollop of swirling shoegazey prog-bobbins sees SCUM moving further away from the Horrors' nonsensically-coiffured shadow. It's a taut, swooshing cloud of grubby psychedelia that wafts about your head knocking over tables like a velvet-clad drunkard at a jumble sale, all agitated, lolloping guitars, terse barrel-thumping percussion and frantic vocals. Imagine Iggy Pop, Lou Reed and Brett Anderson playing a tense game of strip Buckaroo in the back of a smoky pick-up truck on a windy night, and you're halfway there. Wonderful.
Skepta
Make Love Not War (3Beat)
Skepta has been trying to wheedle his way on to the bus from respected, underground grime prospect to mainstream R&B coin-shitter for a while now, and quite frankly, it's becoming a little embarrassing. Here we see him waddling alongside the bus, jeans round his ankles, shrieking increasingly preposterous rhyming couplets – "These other guys ain't got the stamina/ Me, I rock and roll like Noel Gallagher" – before raising his ennui-engorged eyes to see Tinie Tempah doing a power-moony at him from the emergency exit window.
Tellison
Freud Links The Teeth And The Heart (Naim Edge)
As tear-festooned metaphors for unrequited love go, dental disease isn't the greatest, but confusingly amorous orthodontic undertones aside, what else is on offer here? Well, not much. It dribbles along aimlessly, whispering a series of brain-scrunching vapidities up its own bumhole – "I fancy off her pants" – before petering out altogether, leaving a phantom "wet dog basket" odour.
Tulisa
Young (AATW/Island)
"Forgive me for what I have done! Because I'm young!" Tulisa pleads, perhaps not entirely subduing the suspicion that last month's leaked video of her performing fellatio with all the warmth and eroticism of a cat sucking piss off a thistle could, in a world of limitless possibility, have been a mind-bogglingly ill-conceived marketing ploy to which this is the underwhelming crescendo. Obviously, we can only comment on the song itself: the sort of generic, thwompy-clompy, turd-in-a-box, Balearic club fodder that gets lazily spaffed out every single summer, but then, what else were you expecting?
Mindless Behaviour
Girls Talkin 'Bout (Interscope)
Apparently this song contains "an inspiring message that transcends all boundaries". Sadly our copy must have been warped, or said message must have been played on a young person's equivalent of a dog-whistle, because all our wizened-pork scratching ears could make out was the sound of four chirruping, shiny-knackered pop-sprogs, reading from their Bumper Book of Dance Tune Cliches. The kids are going to bloody love it. Sorry.
