A word, if I may:

MOTHER OF FUCKING JESUS, WHERE THE FUCK DID ALL THE HOT NEW MUSIC GO? I mean, yes, I haven't forgotten either last year's quick start (LCD Soundsystem! MIA! New Daft Punk album!) or the cavernous lull that followed hot on its heels (Maximo Park-ark-ark-ark...), but still, damn - every minute that goes by just makes me want the Black Leotard Front album that much more. Which is, I suppose, a perfectly normal thing, except for there's this little matter of this mp3 blog doohickey that I'm supposedly curating which is falling to absolute shit all around my ankles.

Richard X, "You Used To" (feat. Javine) - I'm actually not even sure I have all that much to say about this song itself, although recent weeks have confirmed it as both one of the very best things on the absurdly underrated X-Factor Volume 1 and one of Richard X's most compelling accomplishments to date - he's made a billion songs more explosively fun to listen to, but he's arguably never made anything that sounded so much like the archetypal pop song; think of this as his "Since U Been Gone" and maybe you'll wake up to it quicker than I did. But again, I'm not sure that that's necessarily why I'm listening to it; at the moment I'm consuming all the RX I can lay hands on in anticipation of Richard X-mas ("Fugitive"! "Two of Hearts"! Alesha Dixon! Roisin Murphy! etc), and it's entirely possible that my flipping out over "You Used To" may just be a byproduct of it being the best song I hadn't previously discovered. Still, there's that moment in the chorus when the wall of synths just caves in like the roof of the universe, so even if "Fugitive" turns out to suck eggs (NOT BLOODY LIKELY INNIT), at least I'm not coming away empty-handed. (Click here to buy Richard X Presents His X-Factor from Amazon

Clipse, "What's Up" (feat. Liva, Sandman, Pharrell) - There is of course no shortage of reasons why one shouldn't flip out over We Got It 4 Cheap Vol. 2 like it's the second coming of The Blueprint - it's transparently gimmicky, Pharrell grabs the mic with predictably unsexy results (and on more than one track no less), lame people are already hard at work running all the best lines into the ground, etc. Needless to say, I don't give Fuck One about any of these; I may regret it later in life, but hell yeah I'll go ahead and call Vol. 2 the best rap album since The Blueprint, if only because it's been that long since I've run across another rap album that held my attention in that particular manner - it's just that Pusha and Mal et al. decided to make an album about co-ca-een-uh instead of the greatness of Jay-Z. There really is something to be said for an album when every time you listen to it, you're discovering new facets to it, and at the risk of exposing my lameness to the world(er...), I still can't listen to Vol. 2 without catching another offhanded little line that leaves me trying to frantically stuff my brains back into my head. "What's Up", in addition to summing up the album's aesthetic with one effortless lift of a Timbaland beat crushed under the tedious weigtht of the Game, probably has the Line Of Lines off Vol. 2; in the wake of both Jermaine DuPri and LL beating the hook from "Zen" into obsolescence, it's hardly been a surprise to see "What's Up" suddenly pop up as The Track Everyone Knows Off The Album, but hey, the line? "Muah, magnifique" - goddamn right. (Click here to buy We Got It 4 Cheap Vol. 2 from Mixunit.com)

ShitDisco, "Disco Blood" (Clor remix) - And hey, howabout something that set my earphones on fire today? I've had the ShitDisco single poking around my iPod since it came out, but somehow it took me until today to wake up to this rather astonishingly (synth)rocking remix at the hands of Clor. My guess is that this has something to do with the Clor factor at work here; as far as I was concerned, before today, Clor was "Love + Pain" and nothing else. But again, I have to admit that this right here is a hell of a little remix, transforming the original's Talking Heads-on-speed frenetic groove into a glitch-thrash workout worthy of MSTRKRFT (someone somewhere in the world is surely mixing out of the "Disco Blood" remix into MSTRKRFT's remix of "Little Girl" as we speak) without sacrificing too much of the original's singalong awesomeness. Sure, it may not be a patch on the original (which really is revealing itself over time to be one of the most durable singles that I found last year), but fuck, it's at least good enough to send me home from another day in the salt min^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmailroom without completely hating life. Or at least not the music-listening part of life, anyway. (Click here to buy the "Disco Blood" single used from Amazon.co.uk)