New Musick Monday

As 2010 begins it's slow descent, it's heart-warming that some things never change. With that in mind, we've decided to keep on going with our only regular feature, the hugely successful, New Musick Monday. For those of you who are new to Musick, we basically scour the internet (i.e. go on nme.com and check their weekly new releases page) and bring you all the details about three exciting bits of music. These are usually in the form of two albums and a single, but we have been know to mess with the formula, usually with pretty exciting results. So, who is on our first rundown of 2010?

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Contra by Vampire Weekend



It's strange that these four young men from New York can cause such rage in certain sections of the music press. Is it because they're intelligent? Or that they show off that intelligence? Is it their love of African music and the way they interpret it? Is it because they have a tendency to comes across as smug? Would we rather all our bands were stupid and arrogant? So many questions, and yet, in reality, they're a band that have made one very promising album of catchy, guitar-based pop and are now about to follow it up with another one that expands slightly on their sound without scaring the horses. They're perhaps not worth all this fretting, and yet at the same time are really very good and jolly well deserve the success that will come their way with Contra. This is a brilliantly tight run through of new single 'Cousins' on Letterman.

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Acolyte by Delphic



It is a lovely cover isn't it? This is the debut album by Delphic, who are three criminally serious young men from somewhere in the UK. They finished third on the BBC Sound of 2010 poll and have been tipped for big things by just about every publication under the sun. So, what do they sound like? Well, they're a little bit Bloc-Party-meets-Klaxons-meets-Cut-Copy-meets-Hot-Chip and the album is produced by Ewan Pearson who has twiddled knobs for people like The Rapture, M83 and Gwen Stefani. As with most debuts it's a little patchy, but tracks like 'Doubt' prove they know their way around a dance/rock hybrid.

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'Heaven Can Wait' by Charlotte Gainsbourg



The song with the amazing video gets it's UK release and what a lovely little ditty it is. Produced by Beck, and featuring the diminutive fellow on backing vocals, it's all gently rattling percussion and warm organ sounds. Gainsbourg's sweetly fragile vocals work well with Beck's only mildly more robust croon and it's enough to make you forget the dual horrors of Beck's love of Scientology and Gainsbourg's recent horror show in Antichrist.