Can't hold me back in the chorus

I am totally down with that recent crop of bands in which everyone seems to be having a good old sing-a-long... Architecture in Helsinki springs to mind, who I just love (own one of their discs and I may just bare my beating heart).

Other bands in this category include Of Montreal (my recent exposure to Satanic Panic in the Attic has left me quite the fan; owning this disc will do you no harm at all), Arcade Fire (who Marc and I have never agreed on... their next CD will prove very telling I do think), Feathers, Danielson (although I wouldn't want to see more than two of their albums) and much of the new weird folk movement.

In a slightly different vein, one is allowed two or three Neko Case CDs, but only the first Coco Rosie disc.

Derivative rock rehashings + funky soul whatever

The current crop of derivative 70s rock bands has a place, and that place is, I feel, in live shows.

I am not sure if anyone really needs a Wolfmother album, however wonderful their mystical cover art may be.

However, discovering a ticket stub to a Wolfmother concert would not be cause to kick someone out of your life, because they probably had a whole lot of fun, just as I did when I attended the Wolfmother show in London.

But you didn't see me come away with a CD in my hand.

By its very nature, much of this kind of music is rendered flawed by this related issue.

As for Gnarls Barkley, well I have the St Elsewhere disc and love about 40% of it. The other half veers from average to uncomfortably-close-to-Outkast (no, no, no, no, NO), so I don't think we can get too excited about them yet. I certainly wouldn't want to find evidence of a pre-order for their next album while rummaging through a prospective partner's wallet / receipts drawer.

Noonday Underground are a cooler Gnarls Barkley in many ways, and both Self Assembly and Surface Noise are allowed, indeed even encouraged.

The Black Hit of Space: excess of synth-pop

Synth. Synthesizer. Synthetic. Not real (feeling/music)? It depends whose hands the synthesizers are in. I can say that any pre-Get Ready New Order album is fine. Pet Shop Boys albums do nothing for me but I will allow any number of albums just not too many recent ones, and not a back catalogue nor the remix albums Disco or Disco II. Human League are allowed Travelogue and Dare and that's all. Heaven 17 are pure pomp and thus banned. Erasure are only allowed The Innocents or Drama but not both. Any number or pre-1992 Depeche Mode is fine bar a full back catalogue.

Ladytron - er, no thanks. Generally, rehash is the way to irritate me.

You might want to read this too.

Jazz Odyssey: the pitfalls of post-rock

Simon Reynolds, perhaps the only music journalist ever not to use ridiculous barrages of adjectives in his articles defined post-rock as using rock instrumentation for music not within the usual template of rock. So I would probably go on to say that I would class Mogwai (two albums maximum) and Sigur Rós as rock, just to clarify before I plumb further pedantic depths.

I was at a friend's house yesterday and we listened to Stereolab's Dots And Loops and I was asking him if he had heard any other Stereolab stuff and he said no but he'd like to. I then asked if he had heard any Tortoise and he said that he had TNT but didn't think that he'd want to own anything else.

That's pragmatism in action, I think, because as much as Tortoise do experiment, I don't think it's sufficient enough a departure to make it necessary to own any more than one Tortoise album but I'd say two maximum. The same with Godspeed You Black Emperor. You don't need to own any Trans Am or Labradford but they're one album only type people. Slint's Spiderland is overrated but I don't object too much.

As for the aforementioned Stereolab, Pete said five, but maybe this is too liberal.

By the way, you will find plenty of objectionable material, certainly enough to call me a hypocrite at my new MP3 blog Vacuum Packed Beats.