Pick of the week: Fuck Buttons, Surf Solar (ATP Recordings)
The story goes like this: two young men make an album of ecstatic psychedelic noise, play it to holiday camps full of blissed-out indie kids, and decide that dancing is the answer. Add acid house veteran Andrew Weatherall on production, and the result is this: a 10-minute epic of hoover-rave that sounds like the rocket ship finale to My Bloody Valentine's You Made Me Realise sweeping through Gatecrasher circa 1998 and turning everyone in it to candy-coloured skeletons.
Florence And The Machine, The Drumming Song (Island)
There's a drumming noise inside Florence's head. Oddly, it sounds a bit like a 13-year-old boy's drum lesson. But that's OK because it's supposed to sound "shamanic", and so goes nicely with Florence's frankly unhinged voice, which is so 110% you'd swear she was having a competition with La Roux to smash a decanter on a distant mantelpiece. It also adds a spot of pagan frisson to the video, where Flo dresses up as a sexy Scottish Widow and prances round a church in a Flashdance style, like doing such a thing might be in any way appropriate.
Girls, Lust For Life (Fantasytrashcan/Turnstile)
From the video, filmed in wobbly Super-8 style, to the lyrics about getting all sorts of wasted this couldn't more resemble a portfolio to score the new Levi's advert if it featured a final verse pondering the relative merits of skinny fit versus bootcut. But that doesn't mean it's not very good. Winsome summer-daze pop rattled out on skinny guitar, tambourine and melodica, it's almost impossibly lightweight, but that simply helps it to lift off.
Madonna, Celebration (Warners)
If one could compress Madonna's celebrity career into a single day - increasingly quite tempting in itself - Celebration feels like that point where she's in the back of a cab at 3am with her ears ringing, being sick into her handbag. A clangingly obvious Eurodance monstrosity produced, with grim inevitability, by Paul Oakenfold, Celebration's most unlikable moment comes when Madge utters the words "I guess I just don't recognise you with your clothes on" and hawks up a joyless gurgle from the back of her throat. It's supposed to be a girlish giggle but it's actually a bit sinister.
The Big Pink, Dominos (4AD)
Blame the hype, but modern British indie finds itself in a peculiar place where the contents don't always seem to correspond with the packaging. Read magazine articles about the Big Pink and learn they're skagged-up party monsters who haven't slept since 2007, recording numerous epic, feedback-strafed treatises on the nature of love. Then you put it on and it sounds just like Glasvegas but with lyrics about being a bit nasty to girls and you wonder if you're even listening to the right record.
