THE MUSICAL SLAVE
No Plan ★★★★★
Freed Slave Records
This song has been doing the rounds online all week. But I'm including it anyway because, even if you've heard it before, No Plan is, by a country mile, the sweetest, most tenderly observed and heart-warming music video I've seen in a long time. Kristin Vollset is a street musician from Bergen, Norway, who fell in with a gang of teenage horse enthusiasts after crashing her van into their stable in inner city Dublin. The rapport she strikes up with her "Celtic warrior tribe" is the stuff of feelgood movies. Perhaps the song's most unlikely achievement, though, is rendering the vulgar expression "I'm gonna choke your chicken" in a context so funny and touching, it actually moved this jaded, emotionally stunted critic to tears. You'll have to watch the bloody thing to find out how she did that.
GORRILAZ ft. BENJAMIN CLEMENTINE
Hallelujah Money ★★★
Parlophone
Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett's first new track since 2011's The Fall album is this off-kilter, anti-Trump diatribe sung by 2015 Mercury Prize winner Benjamin Clementine. Online reaction has mostly been negative, but it's got a bonkers, Van Dyke Parks quality to it I rather enjoy. The band's fifth studio album is due for release later this year.
FATHER JOHN MISTY
Pure Comedy ★★★★
Sub Pop
On the title track from Josh Tillman's third album as Father John Misty, the former Fleet Foxes drummer takes swipes at consumerism, climate change and organised religion. As usual, he's too arch, too clever and too smug to really love. But too damned suave and talented either to dismiss.
YOUNG FATHERS
Only God Knows ★★★
Big Dada
Danny Boyle calls this track, which plays over the closing credits of his new Trainspotting sequel T2, a "heartbeat for the film" and a successor to the original film's generation iconic finale Born Slippy by Underworld. No pressure then.
