New singles

Resoundingly gorgeous double A-side from an astonishingly good pop group from Greenwich, south-east London. Both tracks are glorious confections of classic Spector-esque pop, featuring heroically overwrought string arrangements, melodies as colossal, memorable and irresistible as a stampede of elephants bearing down on your tent, and a voice - belonging to one Ali Howard - evocative of arch divas from all points Dusty Springfield to Nina Persson. Almost indecently fabulous.

Article continues

---

---

In dispensing with much of their usual self-conscious artifice on both the musical and lyrical fronts, Placebo have come up with a startlingly fine single. The words are stripped back to the bewildered, outraged, desperate basics, a straightforward plea for reconsideration from some departing paramour who has deemed the singer surplus to their requirements, and there's a similar absence of frills about the fine racket in the background, an insistent snare holding together a monstrous Sonic Youth-ish guitar riff that does a passable impression of a head imploding.

Sugababes
Red Dress (Island)

Philosophers and other underemployed folk have for years considered the conundrum of the old axe: if the handle and the blade have been changed, is it still the same axe? Sugababes, now just one more lineup reshuffle from becoming a musical version of this question, have done better than this - it's a lazy and rather too obvious retread of the vastly superior In The Middle and may well do so again, whoever they are by then.

Depeche Mode
Suffer Well (Mute)

On they plod, a dinosaur that somehow survived into the age of mammals. Suffer Well is another grim, dreary despatch from 1985 or thereabouts, all tinny electronic drums, a guttural bassline retired by the Cure about two decades ago, plinky-plonky keyboards embellished with stabs of swirling synth that are almost corny enough to make one wonder if they were played on one of those guitar-style keyboards which no sane person would now be seen dead with.

Black Eyed Peas
Pump It (A&M;)

It is becoming difficult to recall a single group responsible for such a long, unbroken sequence of stupid, annoying, joyless pop singles as the one Black Eyed Peas have inflicted on an inexplicably receptive public these last few years. Pump It is well down to standard, deploying a sample of Dick Dale's surf guitar classic in a fruitless attempt to redeem what is otherwise another dismal, fatuous, bass-heavy chant-along for baseball-capped morons to play too loudly in their laughably pimped-out Nissan Micras.