In shops tomorrow: 6/8

Singles

So is this No Cars Go 7" ever coming out? Exaggeration, possibly, but it's been on the release schedule twice already, and sightings this week will be welcomed. Us kids, apparently, don't know. After a tribal-rock album that cemented their position as scary emissaries from the avant-artpop underground, even if we didn't quite get it, Liars trail their self-titled fourth album - note to all bands, never self-title the fourth album, it makes it look like you're out of ideas - with the bruising post-punk as imagined by Buñuel Plaster Casts Of Everything. Bricolage are Memphis Industries' latest, rewiring Orange Juice's scratchy funk element where everyone else took the jittery guitars alone. Limited edition 7" The Waltzers promises much, even if it does sound like a second cousin to Mr Blue Sky.

Albums

This week is really all about Kate Nash, all the chart-bound sound talk ringroading the main issue, that being whether someone whose first gig was roughly eighteen months ago (and hands up who else wants to hear her early "skiffle reworking of Robbie Williams' Rudebox") shouldn't really be advised by even the most cash-hungry of major labels to hang on for a bit and sharpen up rather than put something out this early and leave it exposed to the sterile air of undeveloped potential. Oh, and told her to sing properly. And told her that the "suburban living ennui" lyrical thing is dead, largely because it was shit and we got over that when our Thurman CD singles went to Oxfam. Still, let's hope Moshi Moshi, which put Caroline's A Victim out, have done well out of it all. (It's also worth a seethe that Drowned In Sound's A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu-length review finishes "at least she's not Jyoti Mishra". No, White Town were/are great.) Eugene McGuinness' rise, if to a much lower plateau, has been pretty much just as quick, signed to an offshoot of Domino, but at least he's given himself space by putting out his home recordings on an eight-track, about 25 minute mini-album wryly titled The Early Learnings Of Eugene McGuinness. And McGuinness, you can already tell, isn't someone who's going to stand still for long, on various tracks here recalling all points from Morrissey to Jamie T to Willy Mason and so forth. Let's for now call him an antifolk Jeremy Warmsley (again) and mark him down as someone who given time could garner a mass following come this time next year. The reception afforded for Chow Chow's eight-track debut mini-album Colours And Lines is necessarily affected by the recent death of singer/guitarist Iain Smith (they have disbanded but are releasing this with the backing of Smith's family). Sharing a label and producer with the Victorian English Gentlemens Club, they borrow that band's commitedly jagged Pixies/Wireisms and add New Wave synths to produce a kind of intelligent new rave that holds much now unfulfilled promise. To virtually no heralding whatsoever outside the release schedules Gronland, the eclectic Continental label formed by big-selling German Herbert Grönemeyer, is putting out Girl Talk's Night Ripper, the extraordinary intricate mash-up party album that's spent the last year or so setting America alight. The Neutrinos support the Sugababes in their local Norfolk next week, which doesn't make a lot of sense except to whichever booker decided to scare the children on the basis of One Way Kiss, where Stooges-esque garage power collides with Karen Reilly giving it some Polly Harvey circa Dry.
Julian Cope takes a break from ambient experimental meditation tapes and writing a Japanese-based followup to Krautrocksampler, Japrocksampler: How the Post-war Japanese Blew Their Minds on Rock 'n' Roll, published next month (and looking at some rocks, probably) to self-release You Gotta Problem With Me, one CD of stripped down garage rock, one of acoustic politicising. He's fifty in a couple of months. Even he probably didn't expect that. We seem to have missed out on volumes 1 to 6, so we pick up on The Complete Motown Singles Vol.7 in 1967, the year of Jimmy Mack, There's A Ghost In My House, Ain't No Mountain High Enough, When You're Young And In Love, I Was Made To Love Her, I Second That Emotion and I Heard It Through The Grapevine in its original Gladys Knight And The Pips version. Slightly more up to date, Ladytron's Witching Hour electrohouserock excursion grows an extra CD/DVD of remixes and a documentary.