It's been two years since CHVRCHES' second record Every Open Eye but they're already hard at work on the follow-up.

The Scottish group are working with super producer Greg Kurstin who is famous for his work with Adele and Sia who has been pushing them to be "bigger" and "weirder".

When we hit up Bertie Blackman for her Thank God It’s Friday playlist we were confident we’d be treated to a bunch of quality jams and guess what? We were so RIGHT!

It’s come to our attention recently that there are a bunch of performers out there that are alphabetically blocked up.

Whether it’s a fad, or just due to a poor dictionary diet, a significant wave of artists are no longer passing vowel motions.

SBTRKT, MNEK, TKST, MGMT, M83, TLC, PVT, MSTRKRFT, CHVRCHES, N*SYNC…

It seems vowels are out, consonants are in, and the only winner I see out of this is Google Search who no doubt sits and laughs at us sorry folk and our pathetic spelling attempts.

A group we’re really looking forward to re-emerging next year is Chromeo and their fantastic fun funk styles. P-Thugg and Dave-1 have always been so far ahead of their time that “Needy Girl” still sounds wickedly fresh in 2013.

 

One of the better parts of life is the ability to snag a free door pass or two, and thus to check out acts that otherwise would be too expensive to bother seeing (what is it with the price of tickets?). So this weekend I set out to exploit that right in full, flushed by the relative success of Fidlar/Dune Rats live. That gig had most of the normal shortcomings – horrible sound, bad sightlines, over priced drinks but also a pleasant freshness and intensity and a lively moshpit. Live music was redeemed for a moment.