Eoin Butler's guide to singles, downloads and free audiostreams

FRANZ FERDINAND

Ulysses Domino***

It's almost four year since their last album. Which is just about long enough to bury the shame of its cringe-inducing lead single, Do You Want To. Incidentally, Ulyssesis also the name of a very famous novel set in Dublin. Hmm, I wonder if any of this week's other offerings have tenuous Irish connections as well . . .

KATIE MELUA

Toy Collection Dramatico**

Taken from her greatest hits album (already?), The Katie Melua Collection, this sentimental track is no doubt inspired by the toys Katie played with as a child, when her father was a doctor in Belfast's Royal Victoria Hospital(!)

CAT POWER

Auld Triangle Matador**

Well, saints be praised, if it isn't Chan Marshall doing a version of the famous Dominic Behan ballad! Long a favourite of folk singers and geometry teachers, Auld Trianglehas been performed down the years by everyone from Bob Dylan to The Pogues. Sad to say, for all of her abilities as an interpreter of songs, Marshall doesn't add a lot here.

DIDO

Let's Do the Things We Normally Do Sony BMG**

Has someone slipped a hallucinogen in my coffee, or has saccharine songstress Dido Armstrong actually quoted an entire verse of the famous Irish anti-internment anthem Men Behind the Wirehere? It's often said that some singers could sing the phone book and make it sound like poetry. Dido does the opposite. She can sing poetry - or, in this case, political doggerel - and make it sound as inoffensive as an Argos catalogue.

THE CORRIGAN BROTHERS

There's No One as Irish as Barack O'Bama Universal*

The novelty songwriter's lot is not an easy one. Particularly when the task they're faced with is finding rhymes for a name as thorny as Barack Obama. I'll give the Corrigan Brothers props for "old Yokohama". But "Connemara"? "The green Hill of Tara"? Might I suggest, "Whether apostrophe or inverted comma/ There's no one as Irish as Barack O'Bama!"