Weekender : pretending to be a circus clown

FREE MUSIC: As well as having a right bugger of a Myspace code-wise, New York's The Vandelles would quite like you never to have heard the Raveonettes in your life. Past that, and this is your ever welcome sounding low-down distorted fuzzy beat group rock'n'roll for the youth of today. Oh yeah, and never to have heard the Jesus & Mary Chain. Lovely Weather is their key song.

HEY YOU GET OFFA MYSPACE: Winnipeg's Blue Sky Addicts claim to combine "the upbeat joy of Electric Light Orchestra, the enchanting dominance of Sigur Ros, the simple but unpredictable beauty of Hawksley Workman, and the vulnerable sentiments of Stars". There's more Torquil Campbell than Jeff Lynne here, but not by much, and quite a bit of Ben Gibbard and one of that plague of nu-MOR British bands were they not so middly and actually listened to those they portend to take after. There's plenty to enchant, essentially.

VISUAL REPRESENTATION: As it's that special time of year, which we'll come back to, some random clips from our big list. A rare video for the Pop Group's She Is Beyond Good And Evil, for instance. Spizzenergi's Where's Captain Kirk? ramshackle live. The Violent Femmes live in 1984. C30 C60 C90 Go! The Shadows in front of an appreciative Belgian TV crowd in 1964. Prime Dusty Springfield. Erm, prime Captain Sensible. All that sort of thing.

VIRAL MARKETING: British Sea Power release third album Do You Like Rock Music?, a title we can't make up our minds as to whether it's good or bad, on January 14th. Recorded in Hotel2Tango, Montreal, it gives their 1983-as-now sound a good lick of A Silver! Black Fire paint, as previewed on a recent tour of unlikely places. Lights Out For Darker Skies has been played since at least Brighton in May, while single Waving Flags and whatever this one is called were captured at All Saints Church, Newcastle.

FALLING OFF A BLOG: Occasionally we remember we've forgotten to do one of the big hitters in blogworld, such as Hate Something Beautiful, and oddly when we check its latest posts we more often than not find that blog is far more Anglocentric (in this case Kate Nash, Does It Offend You Yeah?, the Ting Tings and someone called The Broken Hearts - London DJs with burlesque fashion, apparently, which has put us right off them before we've heard any of their music) then the top UK bloggers. Odd, that.

EVERYBODY GET RANDOM: One more blog? Oh, go on then, it is Pampelmoose, maintained by Dave Allen, four-string maestro from the Gang Of Four. Given their stance on capitalism it's interesting to see him querying whether Band Of Horses were right to sever advertising links with Wal-Mart, but even more interesting are fragments of two of his band's new demos (one's on the sidebar) as free mp3s, with two more promised this week.

IN OTHER NEWS: And indeed this is the final Weekender of 2007, just as that was the last Weekly Sweep of this year. It'll be all change once we get the tinsel and turkey out of our system - the Sweep moves to Saturdays, while Weekender goes back to Sundays with a rejigged format incorporating a much shorter but no less thorough version of In Shops Tomorrow. From next weekend, you see, it's time for the STN end of year brouhaha, but that's an entirely different matter and one we'd best get cracking with if you don't mind...