Crashing into view with more demented euphoria than a pilled-up elephant tripping through an animal orgy in sweaty celebration of his full-frontal lobotomy, it’s the return of the most accurate and least factual Sunday service in all of Christendom – the ceremony that plucks you from the taxi-rank realism of the quotidian and flits you heavenwards on the back of another heavenly offcut otherwise lost in the thickets of the indierock undergrowth.

Only ever two people short of a threesome, B-Side Sunday rings true like some sort of sonic papal edict of aural salvation, propping up the best traditions of the few through a righteous blast of joy that’ll fistfuck your cerebral cortex as it whispers sweet nothings into your ear. So settle again by the fireside as we lead you through all the usual flights of fancy and wild tangents in another fleet-footed romp around pop’s backgarden, snuffling out the truffles of B-Side brilliance with nought but a twinkle in one eye and a dream in the other.

Long before Albarn started sniffing the inside of glowsticks and sculpting Gorillaz’s digital majesty, Blur were embarking on the slow build from goggle-eyed fascination with American rock to the chirpy cockney warblings that so successfully founded their corner of Britpop – a transition perfectly captured in ‘Young & Lovely’. Flipside to ‘Chemical World’, this was originally set for inclusion on ‘Modern Life is Rubbish’ until those dastardly suits, eyes ever-locked on their unit-shifting dreams, replaced it with ‘Turn It Up’ to appeal to the American market. Jingly-jangly, summertime cor-blimey guv’nar wide-eyed wonderment, it’s the glorious sound of Damon “where’s me washboard?” Albarn perfecting his barrowboy schtick before the band went on to consume Britiain with the superlative-ravaging ‘Parklife’ the following year. Not necessarily everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s good stuff for those who like it.

In other news, this is to be the last B-Side Sunday for a wee while. Like poker, no one wants to quit when they are behind but no one wants you to stop when you’re ahead; Edison extolled the idea of perseverence, he created a thousand lightbulbs that didn’t work – but regardless, sometimes it is simply time to stop. In many ways, it’s nothing short of a miracle that B-Side Sunday lasted as long as it did: like a ragged paper napkin that has outlasted every tea towel in the kitchen, it defied the rules of blog disposability for as long as it could. But hold close to you the warming thought that we shall always have the memories: it was the Sunday service that you truly deserved. Which is meant as a compliment, but then not all compliments are worth having. Amen.

Predictably unpredictable, those Eastern European electro-savantes have done it again with Wax On Wool. With an absolutely insane sense of musicality that pays scant regard to the cloying convention of tawdry ideals such as ‘structure’ and ‘cohesion’, Slowcream craft a bizarrely brilliant brand of wanton experimentia that sounds like two ADHD-riddled robots fucking on a distant planet in the year 4000. Nothing is hurried: it’s all subtle tropes and quiet assurance, but persevere and you’ll discover a well-integrated fusion of classical samples and electronic samples.

Most of the tracks come on as dissonant as the inside of a crash helmet seconds after a motorway pile-up but tracks like the staccato ‘Into Butter’ and fuzzily-distended ‘On Carpets’ provide a neat counterpoint to more soothing segments like the wondrous ‘In The Cave’, which comes together to form a smooth and sensual whole. All in all, Wax On Wool is off-kilter sashay through a fine batch of sporadically-inspired electronic minimalism. Just make sure you get to it before the marketing men plunder and gut it to provide soundtracks for car ads.

Over a decade after the first My Drug Hell album sauntered into the hearts of thousands, the long-overdue sequel finally breaks free from the myriad label and legal disputes to see if it can reignite the fires of our ardour all these years later. Short, sharp and straight to the point, My Drug Hell 2 pays you the compliment of being blunt; firing off watertight tunes packed to the rafters with tall tales of life, love and let-downs.

As bracing as two fistfuls of ProPlus, My Drug Hell’s sharply tailored pop nous is at the forefront of ‘Garden Party’ and ‘Nowhere Town’, whilst the dreamily distended ‘Waiting For Anna’ is the sound of a band madly ricocheting off the walls of their own brilliance. Here to kick against pricks and all the bad noise of landfill indie, My Drug Hell serve up good ol’ fashioned rock and roll – played by men who looked like they were shoehorned into perma-tight black leather from birth and raised on nought but The Velvet Underground ever since. However, it’s not all pouty reverb and sneery strut, as ‘Don’t Fall In Love’ and ‘Any Old Fool’ demonstrate that the band have developed something of a sensitive side in recent times. We are already looking forward to album #3 landing sometime in 2018.

Alas… No B-Side Sunday this week. God loves a trier, but the Vicar simply can’t summon the energy today to cast the moneylenders from the Temple of pop like some kind of modern-day glitterball Jesus, armed ony with a righteous B-Side blast of ‘Side Two’ salvation and the cock-eyed optimism that plagues those men burdened with a dream. Vacation is what you take when you can’t take what you’ve been taking any longer.

Next week, though. Next week he takes it all back. Cherrypicking the best from the rest to leave you in giddy pools of your own sticky, trembling ecstacy that is guaranteed to have you more excited that a puppy that’s just inherited a toilet roll factory – whether you like it or not. Quite simply, it’s the weekly blog ceremony that won’t take your no for an answer.

In a world where change is the only that’s constant, where the 24-hr rolling news monolith of contemporary media is able to break the butterfly upon the wheel faster than ever before, hip young gunslingers White Lies are able to experience the bittersweet sensation of simultaneously topping every ‘One To Watch In 2009′ chart in Christendom whilst also seeing their feted debut given a unaminous thumbs down in the January reviews. But far from the madding crowd of critics shaking their heads solemnly and scribbling out furious declaimations between knotted little fists, ‘To Lose My Life’ shows sporadic signs of so much more.

Now, White Lies might be sprightly young things, but it sounds like they spent their formative years attending more funerals than weddings – the threesome’s morbid pre-occupation with mortality (see ‘Death’, ‘From The Stars’, ‘To Lost My Life’ etc etc) making it no small wonder that they have managed to stay this side of death long enough to write and record an album. Lead singer Harry McVeigh has stated in recent interviews that the band had been listening to “a lot of Interpol” before it came to recording their debut; listening to the results, this is both a complement and an insult the gloomy NYC godheads.

Channelling the bass-heavy, brooding monochrome of a tweenage Joy Division, White Lies certainly do a commendable turn in hip-shivelling drone pop but invariably proceedings sail just wide of the mark, hamstrung too often by McVeigh’s snigger-inducingly ‘serious’ brand of sixth form poetry. On one hand, you might assume that the poor boy stared into the pitless depths of his tortured soul just slightly too long; on the other, you think that he spent so much time squatting dutifully over the fountain of inspiration that he accidently fell in. Despite their melodrama, lyrics such as “my spirit soars above the trees” (To Lose My Life) and “I leave my memoirs in blood on the floor” (EST) fall flat and are delivered with all the resignation of someone who’s just discovered his library card has expired on the same day that the local brand of Hot Topic has closed – the band unable to come up with anything besides a competent amalgam of their cherrypicked influences.

Which is more than a little unfortunate, because first single ‘Unfinished Business’ is a genuinely anthemic and emotive slice of solemn post-punk soul that boasts a chorus the size of Saturn: there’s just so little here that matches it. Sure, the album betrays a commercially ambitious edge which screams “Look At Me!”, but when you do it just pulls a frowny emo face before going back to applying its black lipstick and pouting into the mirror.

Promising without being particularly good, ‘To Lose My Life’ is, if only in terms of quality, fairly reminiscent of Muse’s first effort: flashes of globe-gobbling greatness peering intermittently through the foggy mediocrity of a band just beginning to find their feet. White Lies appear to have fallen to the old enemy of inflated hype – not necesarily through any fault of their own, but whether they can steer the course and come back better with album #2 remains to be seen.

William Blake, in between being riddled with syphilis and harping on about angels in the trees, once remarked that “Imagination is God” – an idea that Mountains certainly took to heart when it came to sculpting their weirdly wonderful blends of electronic and acoustic sounds, moody strings and synths tumbling dreamily across a cavalcade of diversely inventive sonic backdrop.

Much like the relationship between a young man and the silky contents of his mother’s lingerie drawer, Mountains’ third effort is a dark and complex beast; serving as a commendable culmination of their work to date but with an overall more balanced showcase of their mellifluously mellow and melodic talents.

Perhaps as testament to their musical abilities, the cheeky scamps recorded the whole effing lot live with only the most minimal smattering of overdubs, opener ‘Choral’ painting a warmly blank canvas of swaying undulation that acts as a forebear to the album’s myriad of sonic peaks and valleys. Brainy French composer Debussy once claimed that music was “the space between the notes” and, recognising that music is essentially all about tension and release, Mountains fashion a glorious batch of synapse-swelling psychdelia that sounds like a fisherman’s wife got whatever’s left of The Beta Band drunk on bathtub-brewed hooch and sailed them away in a dinghy made of reverb and hope. ‘Telescope’ and ‘Melodica’ are further highlights and by the time the album is over you be quite lost in the charm of Mountains tenderly alluring assurance.

Laughing in the face of the looming recession, those beautiful slags at RCRD LBL have generously unleashed another gem from the vaults, making Bon Iver’s ‘Blood Bank’ available to download today from here. Nice.

Ooooh Lordy! Grander than Don King’s bling cabinet yet packing more wisdom than three brains in a blender, it’s B-Side Sunday! The weekly religious rtiual that’s here to save you from all the bad noise that assails your ears daily, from battery-farmed pop to pasty-faced dance meanderings to issue-riddled moancore that probably shouts out its own mum’s name in bed, B-Side Sunday ties shit music to a chair before beating it to death, burying it under the patio and flitting you heavenwards on the back of another brilliant B-Side plucked from the yawning chasm of muso obscurity.

Coming correct with more records than the KGB, B-Side Sunday remains as thrilling and visceral as diving crotch-first into a threshing machine. And almost four times as fun. It’s the difference between left and leaving, the difference between then and now yet simultaneously also the embodiment of everything inbetwixt. T.S Eliot said that between the idea and the reality falls the shadow: he was almost certainly talking about B-Side Sunday.

This week is the turn of those digital devils Gorillaz, the Albarn/Hewitt cartoon creation that charms you with its arresting sense of the surreal whilst also managing to look so good that it makes Jessica Rabbit resemble a burns victim wearing a Frankenstein mask. And even if they didn’t, ‘Rock It’ (flipside to ‘Rock The House’) remains a zeitgeist-rogering tyke that has the damn-nerve to replace most of the lyrics with “blahblahblah” and still come out the other end a stone-cold triumph of good sounding gurnery. In short, it makes you want to jump up and down like a defiant Ritalin-popping kid on their parents pristine and freshly-made Ikea bedspread until you have an aneurysm. Go back for seconds and stay for thirds, Amen.

That’s right! Marking his return to that business called show just four short years after his retirement with the dire ‘Encore’, Em is once again back nipping at pop’s trouser leg with the priapic, feminist-baiting strut of ‘Crack A Bottle’. Bringing along the venerable Dr Dre and the venereal Fiddy Cent (may he drown in his money bin), ‘Crack A Bottle’ is basically a uber-mucky tale of Eminem chasing a load of lovelies around his mansion like a bling-encrusted Benny Hill with his trousers round his ankles and wielding a fierce erection – a track so clammily libidinous that it has you worrying about what the old perv gets up to in his alone time.

But having listened to it literally several times, everyone at CA towers finds it impossible to think anything very much about it at all – although opinion is sharply divided over whether this comeback single is awfully deep or deeply awful. But Canned Applause prides itself on being the most factful and least accurate interweb muzak service, so instead of subjectively reviewing the song itself and having it buffeted by the flotsam and jetsam of our personal taste, CA objectively presents the vital statistics of ‘Crack A Bottle’ (an exact science method that tells you precisely everything you need to know about anything and nothing):

- Amount of solipsistic grandstanding that reminds us exactly who Dre, Fiddy and Em are: 42 seconds.
- Number of times that we are asked to ‘Guess who is back again?’: 0.
- Number of Dido samples: 0.
- Number of good Eminem verses: 1.
- Number of rubbish, loping choruses: 4.
- Number of verses where Fiddy croons with all the charm of a threatening late night phone call: 1.
- Number of times you pause to marvel at Dre’s production: Between 2-3.
- Number of times Eminem tell us that he loves his daughter: 0 (!)

Conclusions: The first sign of madness is trying the same thing again but expecting different results. Thus, the above experiment scientifically proves that although Eminem is ‘branching out’ from his usual lyrical oeuvre, it’s pretty much just another offcut that sounds like it belongs on ‘Encore’ (although it will still probably stay lodged at Number 1 for however long is left of forever). Frankly, Dre’s ‘Detox’ better be better..

Parisian electro-sexpot Chloe manages to successfully weld her considerable style and dancefloor elegance to a batch of remixed tracks that amply showcase a French scene in rude health. Key member of the Kill The DJ collective, Chloe certainly has previous when it comes to firing off dancefloor-eating monoliths of glittery disco-dance – ‘..Vol 1′ another scattergun exercise in getting you to shake your booty like a sack full of panic-stricken cats.

Coming hot on the heels of debut album ‘The Waiting Room in 2007′, this album sprung into life to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the legendary French venue Robert Johnson, long-time resident Chloe crafting a passionately precise buffet of electro goodness plucked straight from the ProTools of some of the scene’s leading lights.

So insouciant and electro-shaggable that it could make Pete Burns’ make-up melt into a creamy sludge around his stilettos, the majority of ‘..Vol 1′ might sashay past without making much of a mark, but when Chloe gets it right she does so empathically: you would have to have less of a trouser pulse than Melvyn Bragg immediately fall for ‘Phunk’ or ‘Ice’ in that gooey, constrictive sort of way that a mad old lady loves the last of her cats who have yet to run away. Same goes for the ace ‘Circles’ and the woozy novocaine-bliss of ‘Reach’. Listen until your ears give out, then buy a hearing aid and crank it up.