Listen Up! No. 38: Arcade Fire - We Used To Wait

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Sounds like The Suburbs could be the longest 63 minutes (63 minutes!?) of your life. But then, the suburbs often amount to nothing much without the immediate context inwhich they're located, so we'll see...

Listen Up! No. 38: The Drums - Let's Go Surfing

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The unstudied enthusiam of this excellent re-release - almost a year on from the original limited run - is welcome, not least as it further clarifies the dreary self-contemplation which permeates the rest of their disappointing debut LP. This is the only cut you really need, neatly adorned with a video which made me chuckle in spite of myself, and hope there's hope for them yet.

Listen Up! No. 37: Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin - Sink

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The Missouri quartet return on typically unpretentious form - think handclaps, harmonies, and hooks hooks hooks. Good news for fans: Anyone who picked up their first couple of LPs will be overcome with the kind of familiar cheer usually associated with seeing an old relative; you weren't really aware that you'd missed them, but they provide a welcome sense of place and they've got new stories to tell. Good news for newcomers: The jangling, Shins-ish indie-pop won't require an evening holed up in your bedroom with a bottle of red wine to get used to - you'll know it before you know it.

Get the free track here, or watch a promo for their new record below.

Listen Up! No. 36: Harlem - Gay Human Bones

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Injecting the garage-rock scene with yet more irony and self-deprecation (erm, yay), but slowing down so you can hear the words and frame the hooks (double yay!).

Listen Up! No. 35: Klaxons - Echoes

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As someone who spent longer than most intensely disliking Klaxons the first time round (before eventually growing to accept their record), I feel as qualified as the next hater to tell you this: the clothes and video are now desert (as opposed to astro-) themed, but are still largely in keeping with the unrepentent faux-literate cosmic doggerel of the lyrics. A beefier tune eventually presents itself though, even if the falsetto remains.

Listen Up! No. 34: Japandroids - Younger Us

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"Gimme that night you were already in bed, said 'fuck it', got up to drink with me instead. Give me younger us". Wishing they were still 17 has it's upsides; reminding us that we once were - and playing like they still are - for example.

Listen Up! No. 33: Wolf Parade - Oh You, Old Thing

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Synth you been gone...

Listen Up! No. 32: The Pernice Brothers - Jacqueline Susan

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For a band who won the cringeworthy, complelely irrelevant delicate title of #1 Most Exquisitely Sad Song in the Whole World for 1998's heart tugger 'Chicken Wire', this is remarkably jaunty. Time is a healer, perhaps?

Listen Up! No. 31: Kid Adrift - Oxytocin

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Smart, darkly humorous video meets borderline excellent electro track from eccentric newcomer? I smell a blogging stampede...

Listen Up! No. 30: I Blame Coco - Self-machine

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Every little thing she does is magic? More like ghosts in the machine...

Listen Up! No. 29: The Hold Steady - Hurricane J

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Small town problems; big time pathos - as always.

Listen Up! No. 28: Mystery Jets - Dreaming Of Another World

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Rewriting the 80s as if Duran Duran were sex-starved literature students.

Listen Up! No. 27 - Os Mutantes - A Minha Menina

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An oldie, granted, but this one slips through the 'new music' net for being the showpeice track off the sublime Tropicalia: A Brasilian Revolution In Sound - a very worthy introduction to an under-appreciated genre - which is (re-packaged and re-)released on Monday. The more astute amongst you will note that the merging of words, in this case 'tropical' and 'psychedelia', was the preserve of musical genres, not celebrity couples, back in the late 60s. Brangelina always sounded more like a flavour of Gino Ginelli than an acid-rhumba fusion to me...

Listen Up! No. 26: Bombay Bicycle Club - Ivy & Gold

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Bombay Bicycle Club go Mumford and Sons? They're either not as smart as they think they are, or not as smart as I thought they were. Both, probably.

Listen Up! No. 25: The Antlers - Sylvia

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The dribs and drabs nature of promotion for the Antlers' ghostly Hospice did it as little justice as me plucking a 'single' from it share with the world. Still, here goes: enjoy this, then immerse yourself in the morbid glory of the record in it's entirety (a concept album revolving around a child's fight with leukimia, no less).

Listen Up! No. 24: We Are Scientists - Nice Guys

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We Are Scientists doing their sorta-earnest, sorta-subversive, always catchy thing; Andy Burrows (yup, that one) doing his drumming thing (doesn't miss a beat); and a goofy video inwhich weedy indie-rockers do their thing on scooters (i.e. fall off). It's as good as they'll ever be (or ever were), which constitutes a compliment, but not an endorsement.

Listen Up! No. 23: The Young Veins - Take a Vacation!

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Struck with the realisation that at 22 they still had time to do something meaningful with their lives, and sobered with the realisation that being in Panic At the Disco wasn't it, these two average-to-accomplished guitarists (Ryan Ross and Jon Walker) have now set about writing average-to-accomplished Byrds-ian 60s pop. It's got all the emo kids rather, erm, emotional - an irony which is probably lost on them.

Listen Up! No. 22: Caribou - Odessa

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The flagship track from Canadian bedroom-beats man Dan Snaith's 'breakthrough' record Swim, this one's 'Penny Lane' for a genre where 'breakthrough' constitutes #97 on the Billboard 100.