PITCHIN'

Hi-Gate

Well, here we are in the year 2000, and has anything changed? Has it hell. We're not wearing clothes made out of tin-foil, our diet doesn't entirely consist of small pills, our cars don't double as aeroplanes and nobody lives on the moon. Possibly the worst thing about moving from 1999 to 2000, however, is the fact that my bank is Millennium Bug-proof and I still have an overdraft. Damn. So how do we go about pretending that we really are in a new era? Simple. By buying this gem of a tune. It's happy, it's boppy, it's mental and apparently it was all done on a PlayStation. You know, the games console. It's been nowhere near any musical instruments ever. Could you have got away with that before? No, you couldn't. This is the future. Westlife is not.

YOU ONLY TELL ME YOU LOVE ME WHEN YOU'RE DRUNK

Pet Shop Boys

What in God's name has happened to Neil Tennant's voice? He never had the strongest vocal cords to begin with, but here he sounds like he's fighting a losing battle against the massed ranks of musicians (Chris Lowe). Now, I wouldn't mind if the song was any good, but it's not. In fact, it's possibly their dullest ever single. Now that's out of the way, I'm off to dig out my copy of Left To My Own Devices and remember them as they were, ie. good.

THE MASSES AGAINST THE CLASSES

Manic Street Preachers

After the boring This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours album, I thought that was it for the Manics and they were going to gradually go for the Middle-Aged-Rock scene. That's why this Extraordinarily Limited Edition Single is so surprising. Two points seem to jump out straight away when you hear it for the first time - 1) it's actually excellent and 2) it's loaded with more energy than a Lucozade factory. It's easily the rockiest thing they've done in many years (since the 1990s - remember them?) and it's like the last two albums never happened, which is fine by me.