The Hidden Cameras - "Learning the Lie". With "Learning the Lie", The Hidden Cameras propose a hypothesis: The Velvet Underground, at their best, may be emulated by just mumbo-jumbo mumble-wacka-wacka'ing the lyrics. "Mumbo-jumbo mumble-wacka-wacka" is a phrase of my own creation, an attempt to formalise the bullshit Joel Gibb gets up to here. He's just tootling away, singing nothing at all, smirking in the confidence of his caricature. And I kinda want to sock him in the mouth for thinking that he can get away with this. A slouching guitar-line, a dented violin, forward-leaning drums: this is all you need to pretend to be The Velvets? He's "hilariously mistaken". But as I stride towards him, sleeve rolled up, cheeks sucked in so I look something like a death's-head Popeye, he gets me. Joel gets me. The swing's in my step and I can't shake it out, the hook's in my ears and I can't get them clear, I'm singing along and I can't help myself. "Ooo-do-do-doo doo, haw-aw oo-doo doo doo!" I feel like a square so I lean up against a building, put hands in pockets, wait for the man. Tap my foot and grin like a damn fool. [buy Awoo]

Low - "Belarus". Drums & Guns, the new album by indie careerists Low, is downright terrific, my favourite LP they've ever produced. It sounds real funny on headphones - mixed weirdly separate, far-right and left. But set it playing in a room and each channel catches the resonant frequency of a different object. They shattered my incandescents, my fluorescents, made my tables buckle, knocked tribal masks from my walls. All slow like, so I couldn't tell what was happening. I'd just feel a heat in my chest then hear splintering wood or shattering glass. It's a lulling music that's very, very hot - lows and highs in concert, like two candle flames touching. "Belarus" is trapped voices, canned drum loop, rehearsed vocals, bottled strings. The only thing that's free is the bassline, like the patrol around a field, the soldier whose been told to wait for the armies to arrive. [buy]

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One of the best songs I've heard this week is "Alone Again", by Illinois, posted over at Molars. It's three minutes that sounds like less than one - the chorus only comes once, only once! And that moment is handclaps and oohs and red-hot guitars and voices singing in harmony that "I'm alone again / I'm alone again / I'm alone again / I'm alone again". Like it's a happy inevitable, a triumph, the sweetest fish that Fate could hook on your line. Maybe it's psychopathy, or reverse psychology, but it feels rightest to me as a song for someone who's too far gone to be able to handle anything else. A sleeping pill, or a love-letter to keep you alive.

Fluxblog's written about LCD Soundsystem's "Someone Great", one of my favourite songs of 2007 so far. Matthew nails the description of James Murphy's vocals - "shell-shocked ... utterly lost within himself and unsure of his every feeling", - but he neglects the interaction between Murphy's singing and the instrumental portion of the song. Murphy sings with an ambivalence that should be wrenching: a hollowness that would send a happier- of sadder-'sounding' song into the annals of the utterly depressing. Instead he's chosen to do something else. The bassline matches Murphy's tone - submerged, lost, - but almost everything else is just slightly optimistic. Drumsticks click-clack, glockenspiel dings, and synths do little stints of break-dancing. It's not unhappy - nor is it so saccharine that the irony wounds. Instead the song's instrumental is just on the far side of fantasy - trapped on the same side of the glass as Murphy, but in a place his vocals don't depict. It's in the future that never happened, the could-have-been where Murphy - even as he sings the no-it-wasn't - still spends his time. "Someone Great" is filled with the imaginary nostalgic.

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La Blogotheque pulled it off: piece by piece they are sharing a Take-Away Concert in Paris with the Arcade Fire (english translation forthcoming, I'm told).

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Still looking for one more kind soul to join a small Gramophone chalet at the All Tomorrow's Parties festival at the end of April. (In England.) The lineup's got everyone from The Dirty Three to Joanna Newsom, Nick Cave to Cat Power, The Art Ensemble of Chicago to Felix Lajko. Get in touch.