The return of Singles Club

Single of the Week!

The Pipettes
ABC
(Transgressive Records)

The Pipettes know that it’s the little touches that make the difference. An indie-pop take on the 60s girl group aesthetic, everything about them is perfect: the polka-dot dresses, the backing band’s matching tank tops, the choreographed hand movements and dance routines. The songs are witty and finely crafted nuggets of beat-pop, the lyrics an post-riot girl take on the teen melodramas of their spiritual heroines. If the Shangri-Las had gone to Grange Hill they might have come up with something like ‘Judy’, in which the protagonist falls in with the local bad girl but soon learns to see through her. ‘ABC’ wags a finger (Pips gigs involve a great deal of finger wagging, but school marms they ain’t) at bookish boys who’ve forgotten to be men. Finally, there’s Simon Says, a cheeky ode to mild S&M. Apparently Stuart Murdoch has a girl group project on the go, but he’ll be hard pressed to match the Pipettes for sassy, saucy fun.

Non-Londoners can order the single from Transgressive Records

Basement Jaxx feat Lisa Kekaula
U Don’t Know Me
(XL)

Not as good as ‘Good Luck’, their previous collaboration with Bellrays belter Lisa Kekaula, but an entertaining slab of punky disco nonetheless, even if the chorus is half-inched from Goldfrapp’s ‘Strict Machine’ (which was half-inched from Donna Summer in the first place). Kekaula’s take-no-shit vocals stand up to the slightly too polite garage guitars and bloopy synths. The ‘JaxxHouz radio edit’ is superior to the slower original, jacking up the beat and adding plenty of laser beam noises to a typically dense track.