Cults
Abducted (Sony)
If you're going to be in a band called Cults, it's handy if you look as if you've just run away from one. Happily, spaniel-haired San Diego boyfriend and girlfriend Brian Oblivion and Madeline Follin and their hairy bandmates most definitely do. Abducted is brilliant, harmonic west coast pop with a creepy shoegazey edge and a Shangri-Las beat. Like that girl group, they also seem drawn to the darker side of love, and in this case their romantic analogy couldn't be more extreme. It all works, though, even if it's a tune you find yourself swooning along to before realising that perhaps you shouldn't, what with its chorus about being left to "bleed out". David Lynch goes pop.
Nicole Scherzinger
Right There (Interscope)
Although clearly a brilliant business head (she'd kill on The Apprentice), Nicole Scherzinger's music has always been something of a vacuum wrapped in a vortex inside a void, and lacking any personality of its own. Cleverly she's decided to steal someone else's. As well as being a shameless Rihanna rip-off, Right There is also one of those ridiculous sex songs that completely dispenses with mystery and eroticism and ends up making the fine art of making love sound like DIY instructions - "Put your hands right there" she pines; not there, left a bit, right a bit, insert screw here.
Katy B
Easy Please Me (Rinse)
What initially sounds like someone reading out their Facebook status updates ? "Standing at the bar with my friend Olivia" ? ends up being an excellent reflection on the state of modern courtship when you happen to be a "bang tidy" young woman. "Their lines are far too cheesy/ No boy's on the level believe me", she grumbles. Our sympathies, but she'll never meet a fella hanging out in the dairy section (arf!). Like On A Mission, you'll end up loving it even if you start off hating it.
Example
Changed The Way You Kiss Me (Ministry of Sound)
Fulham's Elliot "Example" Gleave looks as if he could be David Schneider's stunt double but makes up for it with a brooding hulk of a voice, both as singer and rapper. Here, a song which starts out as if it's threatening to be a gloomy Pendulum-style nosebleeder brilliantly builds into upbeat techno-pop. Not rocket science, but brilliantly done. The festival dance tents are his for the taking.
Real Fur
Animal (Safari Funk)
Marvelously, this perky London trio are fresh from a tour of performing in the nation's laundrettes and, having also performed in sub-post offices, are laying plans to play newsagents and pet shops, too. So, basically they're touring the country while completing a series of menial tasks (washing, posting letters ?). Animal is like an English village green retooling of Vampire Weekend, simarly inspired by African pop but more breezy and lacking in the Americans' bookishness. Nice music to wash your smalls to but not quite world-changing.
Rachel Perry Mary Elizabeth Winstead Piper Perabo Anna Kournikova Esther Cañadas
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