Weekender : follow our lead on the 1-2-3

CHART OF DARKNESS: Gnarls Barkley clocks up a seventh week, and with nothing else really closing in for next week it could well become the first eight weeker since Wet Wet Wet's Love Is All Around. Worried yet, Bryan Adams? A slightly odd chart this week as LL Cool J's ultimately forgettable Jennifer Lopez 'duet' is at 2, Infernal climb back to 3, Shayne Ward and Kooks both suddenly get a second wind and climb within and back into the top ten respectively and the Pet Shop Boys do the usual at number 8. Daz Sampson lies in wait at 13, the scary eyed, Worzel Gummidged hair bloke and his Boy Kill Boy mates are at a quietly impressive 17 and Christina Milian appears from nowhere at 18 on downloads. Now, what are we to make of The Upper Room? They've been around for a while, playing Truck in 2004, yet suddenly they've had a promo push this year which sees adverts for their album all over the place and a number 22 single this week that as far as we can tell has had very little radio support, specialist or otherwise. Busta Rhymes' Daft Punk cribbing is a download entry at 23, five ahead of Orson (it's not a re-release, we assure you), with Hot Chip still not quite paying back the interest at 40 and the Beautiful South missing out by one. It's just not their time any more.
The Chili Peppers make the inevitable number one entry in the albums, Dirty Pretty Things at 3. Corinne Bailey Rae climbs back to eight for no good reason, Panic! At The Disco make an unwanted top 20 debut, Hayley Westenra makes a decent climb for no good reason to 20, while failing to repay the various bits of serious media that have banged on about them are Scott Walker at 51 and Matisyahu at, ahem, 156. Yeah, you're Hasidic, great. Well, we're halkaline.

FREE MUSIC: Parasol Records, vintage Illinois indie most notable for releasing the original version of White Town's number one EP, like their maxi-indiepop and it seems they might have struck gold again with The 1900s, a Chicago lo-fi sixsome of apparent eclecticism. 60s psych-garage, Stuart Murdoch's pop pen and the Velvets' abandoned organ all show up on Bring The Good Boys Home.

HEY YOU GET OFFA MYSPACE: We should do more delicate stuff sometime, but for the meantime Echo Is Your Love are five Finns onto their fourth album attuned to Blonde Redhead, Sonic Youth's Goo and all that.

VISUAL REPRESENTATION: A real double whammy this week, as it's not just an excellent video off someone's old E180, it's from the original Channel 4 version of the Chart Show! With the original H.U.D.! And for the set, it's from the indie chart and it's Marc Riley up front with his post-Fall band the Creepers doing Eno's Baby's On Fire. We don't think it's deliberately meant to be out of sync in places.

FALLING OFF A BLOG: Another video blog with perfect sense of the rare and interesting stuff this week in the form of Bedazzled! As we type, see the Sweet, Bow Wow Wow, Haysi Fantayzee, Scritti Politti, Sly & The Family Stone, the Clash (on Channel 4 in 1979?), 1973 Devo, Astrud Gilberto...

EVERYBODY GET RANDOM: Quick, this is only up for twelve days until the 27th May, but Sheffield's pummelling post-rockers 65daysofstatic have a free download single of Drove Through Ghosts To Get Here available to knock you square backwards.

IN OTHER NEWS: Indie MP3 has pointed out that that in this week of the twentieth anniversary of C86, of which more soon, German magazine Soundmag is releasing what could count as C06 were our music media so inclined, entitled New British Invasion. Yes, like the antecedent a lot of the bands fit a profile of the day's indie music all too rigidly, there's hardly any women and there's a couple of truly terrible band names, but who wouldn't take a chance?