Baby Monster: Ultra Violence & Beethoven This new Oregon duo sound like Sigur Ros covering MGMT. Superb.
The High Wire: Odds & Evens The London psychedeliacs release the perfect summer single. In November.
Owl City: Umbrella Beach You'd swear this was a new Postal Service single; it's not, but it's still sublime.
Stereophonics: Innocent It's not quite Dakota, but this is Kelly Jones's best song since that 2005 hit.
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Must-have reissue
Tricky: Maxinquaye - Deluxe Edition
This scuzzy, whispered masterpiece is one of the landmark albums of the 1990s. It is also an album that tends to make music-lovers gaze wistfully into the distance as they ponder the extraordinary career we imagined Tricky would have, and the patchy reality of his subsequent output. Yet think of the word "Maxinquaye" not as a title, but as a group name encompassing Tricky and his co-vocalist, Martina Topley-Bird (as it was meant to be before some wrong-headed marketing meeting), and what we have here is not the start of an Orson Welles-shaped career, but a miraculous one-off, a unique piece of musical chemistry in which the voices and personae of the two meld into an androgynous moment of genre-twisting magic. The bonus disc has curiosity value, but no uncovered gems.
Universal Island
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Lady Gaga The Monster Ball tour arrives February 18, 2010, MEN Arena, Manchester.
The Camden Crawl Tickets are now on sale for 2010's trek round NW1, which takes in myriad venues on May 1 and 2.
Imogen Heap The queen of interactivity tours her Ellipse album from February 7, 2010, Academy 2, Manchester.