Weekender : to be kept away from children and held at arms' length

FREE MUSIC: Dragons Of Zynth's background sounds familiar - African-American New Yorkers feted by Bowie and Massive Attack, drawing influence from all over the place and whacking it all together with guitar manipulation, hip-hop inspired drums and vocals of preachers' conviction. Just to prove the point, David Sitek of TV On The Radio produced their debut album Coronation Thieves. Breaker sounds like Black Sabbath doing Return To Cookie Mountain.

HEY YOU GET OFFA MYSPACE: Just to prove round here it's not all Field Mice, from the unlikely environs of Leamington Spa come duo Mysterons, an electronic/sampling duo who produce what could be leftfield hip-hop backings (think MF Doom's assorted projects) were it not for the work and amount of detail that goes into them, like a Big Beat Go! Team. Believe us, it's better than that sounds.

VISUAL REPRESENTATION: For a feature that likes a good tie-in, we've been tardy in stripmining YouTube for Joy Division materials. Not a lot, as you'd imagine, but enough - Shadowplay on So It Goes, She's Lost Control and Transmission (the latter flanked by John Cooper Clarke reading Evidently Chickentown) for BBC youth community series Something Else, broadcast 15th September 1979, and New Order in their later guitar-heavy phase doing Love Will Tear Us Apart for Jools. No 10,000 Things, unfortunately.

FALLING OFF A BLOG: Making Morrissey Sound Like The Birdie Song is a superb title. Given it includes Elliott Smith, Radiohead and both Fish and Marillion they could make a case for the title too.

IN OTHER NEWS: Bands reforming is old news, but the speed and surprise quality of some of those back in grubby rehearsal studios does sometimes still cause the reader to halt for a moment. For example, welcome back Chicks, chiefly interesting because the Dublin girl trio, who made a couple of much loved EPs tracks from which are downloadable from their old label, recorded an album for DreamWorks with Royal Trux producing in 2000 which never saw the light of day, possibly because Neil and Jennifer didn't exactly rate them highly in later interviews. Until now, that is, with three tracks uploaded and apparently the full thing getting a release soonish.