Weekender : much respected, apparently

Before any of that pop music nonsense, hearty congratulations to Tim AKA The Daily Growl, who became a father on Tuesday. Such is the way of Web 2.0 that Isobel has had a Myspace since December.

FREE MUSIC: A good portion of Brighton's much discussed musical fortunes over the last few years can be traced back to Monster Bobby. His Totally Bored club nights and DIY publications helped launch British Sea Power, the Electric Soft Parade, Brakes, 80s Matchbox B-Line Disaster, The Tenderfoot and so forth, some of whom he's been tour DJ and guest musician for. More famously he then became 'concept engineer' (his term) of the Pipettes, developing their schtick and bringing the girls (and Cassette boys, with himself as guitarist) together. And he's working on a book about the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Somewhere in between he's found time to produce oddball short electronically enhanced pop songs, some of which are being collected together under the title Gaps for release in mid-July. The Closest Experience To That Of Being With You Is The Experience Of Taking Drugs - title! - sounds like an English Suburban Kids.../Jens Lekman type being hotwired.

HEY YOU GET OFFA MYSPACE: Belfast's The Clone Quartet have a solid label grounding, having been together since the dawn of the decade yet only just releasing their first single on the safe hands of Tigertrap Recordings (Popular Workshop, Look See Proof, Tiny Masters Of Today if you really must) and having entrusted their album to Smalltown America (Jetplane Landing, Young Playthings, Oppenheimer). They know their way round retro-modernist electro and yearning melodies, but with dashes of non-smug indie disco, taut dynamics and occasionally Biffy Clyro riffage and Bright Eyes heartbreak. A similar cult following isn't out of the question.

VISUAL REPRESENTATION: Television is an endlessly fascinating subject for our purposes, and we've found some absolute crackers for future use here. We must however first examine that whole thorny subject of songs in advertising, forever tainted with that nebulous brush of 'selling out', although not so much these days even as we're assailed between shows by Deerhoof with Robinson's fruit juice and in America American Idol, Ford and Modest Mouse or Outback Steakhouse and Of Montreal. And to think Smirnoff/Pixies was considered recherche in its day. The one thing you don't get a lot of, conversely, is hits coming from adverts, as there was a time you could get anything into the charts if the pitch was good enough but nobody seems to bother any more. Apart from exceptional circumstances, obviously. With that in mind, they can get away with anything - what reflects the nature of a long cruise than Lust For Life? (The British version isn't on YouTube as far as we can tell but it's a lot more sedate)

VIRAL MARKETING: Just to prove the whole of Editors' new album An End Has A Start isn't as tailor made for Grey's Anatomy as the single, they popped by Jools' gaff to show off album highlight The Racing Rats. Note that Tom Smith still does that cupping-eyes-and-mike thing while seated at a piano. The title track, here recorded at the Roundhouse in May, is no slouch either.

FALLING OFF A BLOG: The Post Punk Progressive Pop Party isn't an mp3 blog for once, but instead traverses the turn of the 80s period in on this day factoids, blog links, embeds and so forth.

EVERYBODY GET RANDOM: It's already getting difficult to remember which single act review blogs we've covered. We're fairly sure these three are new, though, and they're very worthwhile entries to the canon, Bjorkian Hyper-Ballads, Magnetic Fields fandom All My Little Words and John Cale-centric Fragments Of A Cale Season. No Fall song-by-song commentary yet, as far as we can tell. Come on, it's not that tricky if there's already two doing Robert Pollard's collected works!

IN OTHER NEWS: We thought we'd mentioned this before but apparently didn't given we received reminder correspondence about it last week, and as we don't seem to be a repository for this kind of thing we might as well flag it up. It's The Solaris Bug Situation, involving Dark Side Of The Moon/Wizard Of Oz-style coincidences between the original Russian version of Solaris and Brian Miller's The Lightning Bug Situation. As we don't have a copy of the film to hand and have never previously heard of Miller or his band The Speakers we cannot vouch for its veracity, but we have a broad audience so maybe you have.