Promising band, beautiful song and a very nice video.

Ian Stevenson has a wicked sense of humour.

For more than four weeks, I have been listening non-stop to the new Kasabian album, West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum. This, my friends, is my album of the year so far. Thick, fuzzy beats and dirty synths make this album a very addictive listen, despite the occasional aggro ‘ladrock’ lyric. This is like Primal Scream’s XTRMNTR with all the energy and production values but without the political leanings and manic intensity.

One major disappointment has to be the album cover photography and the inlay art. On a conceptual level, the photography works but dressing up the band and shooting them almost feels like an easy way out. The art direction on the inlay is nothing to write (or type) home about either. Not bad, but graphically not great enough for an outstanding album.

(Don’t touch that play button if you can’t cope with flashing images!)

Kate Moross and Alex Sushon switched off and on some lights in an industrial setting for the new Simian Mobile Disco video. Yeah, I love organic stuff too, but they could have gotten a good Flash guy to create this video with some masks and Actionscript, man.

Next year is the 20th anniversary of the first album. It’s the ideal time to do it. It’s something I would love to do before we are all fat and bald. Start the campaign.

›› Ex-Roses Mani asking fans to change Ian Brown’s mind

Stephen Wiltshire is a British artist with an amazing gift. He can eyeball the moxt complex cityscapes and draw them from memory with amazing detail and in almost perfect scale. His panoramic hand-rendering of Tokyo is just hair raising when you realize it was all done from his photographic memory. It’s really no wonder he’s dubbed “The Human Camera”.

This is only the second Coldplay record I have in my possession. Someone gifted me the sappy, moody but not-really-that-bad Parachutes album many years ago, and I bought Viva La Vida, Or Death and All His Friends because the cover invoked a bizarre feeling of optimism in me. Even more bizarrely, I also bought it, despite not really liking Coldplay, because I wanted to see if there was any new musical reason to like Chris Martin and Co.

Sadly, I have to say that they still sound like they want to be U2. The guitars sound like a homage to The Edge, and the epic atmospherics of the album sound very Joshua Tree-like. They have Brian Eno as a producer which probably doesn’t help. I’m sure there are definitely U2 fans out there who dig Coldplay but I obviously am not one of them.

My theory is that Coldplay figured that since they were incapable of rivaling the cutting edge Radiohead stuff, they might as well try and fill be the biggest stadium rock band mould created by U2.

As a consolation, thanks to Coldplay’s massive fan base, at least I know I can get a good price at Cash Converters for this CD next week.

Match Day Football Programmes is a collection of match day programmes from the golden era of British football (before all the commercialism, professionalism and all that) published by Fuel Design. It features English league (and a few non-league) clubs from 1945 to 1991. At £18 a piece, this pocket sized book is an excellent window into the simpler (albeit amateur) days of the beautiful game.

Very nice photography for British Airways but what’s the point when BA’s staff can’t hold their shit together, eh? But great photography nonetheless from a team of about five photographers — see the other images here.

A true case of being lost in translation. An error of this magnitude must be both laughable and infuriating.

Aston Martin is building a brand new, super-exclusive coupe codenamed One-77. There are a number of ‘leaked’ renderings of the car flying around and it looks bloody sweet. Well, it better look sweet because it is reportedly going to sell for about £1.2M when its launched. They are also only going to build about 70 odd units of this car, which is a smart move because the number of affluent investment bankers still in a job has significantly dwindled in recent months

Realising their miserable failure as indie rockers, the now defunct Simian branched out sideways into the dance side of the indie spectrum as Simian Mobile Disco. Their 2007 release Attack Decay Sustain Release is a collection of mostly punchy, light and hook-laden dance tracks. Given their rock roots, this is admittedly rather effete dance music fare but you won’t really care or notice once you get into it.

Simian Mobile Disco are actually in town and will be playing at Zouk tonight. It’s probably going to be an awesome set and, unless you are pregnant or otherwise limited in mobility, you really have no excuse not to be there tonight.

Nick Franglen and Fred Deakin (aka Lemon Jelly) released their full debut album, LemonJelly.ky in 2001. It was both a commercial and critical success, and if you listened to the album, you’d know why. With the warm, organic beats and weird, psychedelic synths, this album will just make you happy. Very happy and quite bouncy all day long; go give it a listen it if you haven’t yet!

You could say that if Definitely Maybe was their Stone Roses, Dig Out Your Soul is their Second Coming. It won’t win them any new fans, but those that believed the truth last time will dig this.

›› The Observer reviews the new Oasis album

With all the money they made, I suppose the Arctic Monkeys‘ Alex Turner could do whatever the hell he felt like doing. And so maybe he decided to gang up with his friend Miles Kane, start a side project called The Last Shadow Puppets and release a ballsy and ambitious album titled Age of the Understatement that would pay homage and draw inspiration from retro ‘orchestral’ pop music.

Despite the arrangements sounding somewhat familiar (maybe nostalgic is the right word here), the sweeping strings, fulsome percussions and great energy make this a very, very good album. Already I am thinking this should be one of the best albums of the year.