Cloudspeakers

There are plenty of reasons you could be irked by Adam Young, the 23-year-old from rural Minnesota whose escapist confections meld a fey, Green Gartside falsetto with emo hooks, high-energy electro... Read more

It’s almost two years since the Leeds singer-songwriter Corinne Bailey Rae lost her husband to a methadone overdose, and the languorous soul-pop of her mid-Noughties breakthrough has been sti... Read more

For his first album without his fellow Guillemots, the man with a name like a Spitfire ace cuts loose with with breezy derring-do. Swooping from Hamburg-era Beatles (When You Walk in the Room) to s... Read more

When, in February, pictures sped around the world of the Barbadian singer Rihanna, cheeks and forehead heavily bruised, lips bloodied and swollen after being beaten by Chris Brown, her boyfriend at... Read more

Not since Eminem met Dido has there been a more lopsided collusion of talents than Kanye West and Ben Hudson. And at least they made Stan, whereas West has been sucked by his London protég&e... Read more

If you had told Ian McCulloch in his pomp that, come 2009, he would be working with a teeny-bop producer, he’d have given you a post-punk headbutt. But John McLaughlin (Busted, 5ive) has kind... Read more

Her hips don’t lie, her breasts are humble and for her next trick the Colombian queen of odd has cast herself as a Latin-American lycanthrope (the spacy glitch-pop of the title track) and a L... Read more

This Canadian electro-house boffin has made noble efforts to defy faceless-dance-music stereotypes, notably by wearing a giant scarlet mouse head on stage. There are signs of personality, too, in h... Read more

The title of Faulkner’s sophomore album refers to the doctors who repaired the broken wrist that threatened to end his guitar-playing career. They did a fine job, as his acoustic strumming so... Read more

In his bravura second album, the clown prince of arena pop has progressed, he says, from childish inspirations to adolescent ones. His palette of unfashionable influences has certainly widened from... Read more