There’s a lot of looking backwards this week, with Slow Club covering songs from the 1960s, Twin Atlantic sounding like Hundred Reasons from the early noughties, Sennen sounding a bit like a shoegaze band from the early nineties and Elizabeth Frazer sounding nothing like one (despite being in one at the time) and Johnny Flynn doing his medieval troubadour thing. Mcfly? McFly? Hello?

Twin Atlantic – What Is Light? Where Is Laughter?

Presumably, when you’ve finally run out of Biffy records, this is what ends up on the stereo. Nothing bad here at all – in fact, it’s pretty rousing, and all pleasingly done, all choppy staccato belts of loudQUIETloud etc – but it’s nothing Hundred Reasons weren’t doing at the start of this decade. Only with a Scottish accent, and a much better set of haircuts. Still, more power to their elbow.

Slow Club – Christmas ,Thanks For Nothing

Blimey, a Slow Club christmas EP, is it December already? Twelve months on from the aceness of ‘Christmas TV’, the two cutest people in the whole wide world are back, and try gamely to persuade us that Christmas makes them angry, when we all know that Slow Club when angry is still chirpier than a flock of early-morning Xmas robins. So, while they really do have a go at pretending they’re all arch and stuff about the whole shebang on the title track and ‘It’s Christmas And You’re Boring Me’ (in which Rebecca can’t even muster up the meanness to dump the dullard boy until the New Year), there’s also two Phil Spector / Darlene Love covers to correct the balance, with ‘Christmas Baby, Please Come Home’ sure to become the final song at every single hipster chrimbo disco this year. The only downer here is that there’s only one stab at shared vocal duties, which is one of the things I always adored about this band. Still, ’tis the season and so on, and this record’s going to go some way to making even me a little bit jolly again this year.

Sennen – Destroy Us

If there’s one thing among the many, many things that make me teeth-grindingly angry, people who use ‘nu-’ as a prefix to an existing genre is right up there. Makes my damn blood boil. Lazy, irrelevant, and stupid, stupid, stupid. So when I read that Sennen are – apparently – ‘nu-gaze’, I want to instantly murder them, their publicists, and anyone who’s ever used the phrase, plus their families, friends, pets and the bus driver that takes them to work. Although, fair’s fair, they do sound a bit like an updated version of Ride, who were fucking great. The title track off this EP’s also particularly arresting and grand, taking all the good poppy bits of shoegaze, dumping all the shit pompous bits, and adding a liberal dash of Mercury Rev dreaminess for good measure. They also manage to cover New Order’s ‘Bizarre Love Triangle’ on here without sounding like total idiots, which is no mean feat, although having your singer sound an awful lot like Bernard Sumner  to start with doesn’t hurt. So I guess it is (a little bit) ‘nu-’, and (quite a lot) ‘gaze’. Fuck, now I’m totally conflicted.

Elizabeth Fraser – Moses

You see, by happy chance, the 12″ for this, the first single in donkey’s from Elizabeth Fraser, ex-Cocteau Twin (the band about whom that original daft “sonic cathedral” phrase was coined) is also now out there, and there’s nothing ‘nu-’ about it at all. In fact, it’s all rather michevious and head-nodding, but right there, at the heart of it is that damn voice, the one that blew everyone away for a whole decade before the Cocteau wall came tumbling down in 1998. It’s a genuine pleasure to hear it again.

Johnny Flynn – Sweet William EP

With the Sussex Wit presumably shacked up with Peggy Sue’s Pirates, we’re back to more shambling, jumbling English folk indie. I saw him a couple of years ago at SXSW, and loved him then, but I can’t help but pay a teeny bit of attention to the nagging voice in my head that’s pointing out it’s more of the same. Someone with such a glaringly large bucket of musical talent at their seemingly effortless disposal should surely be capable of more than one joke, right? Still, if you’re not up to speed with it all yet, it’s charming and lovely stuff.

Here’s the full list of Singles & EPs that are out this week that caught our attention:

• Eliza Doolittle – Eliza Doolittle
• Johnny Flynn – Sweet William
• Medicine And Duty – The Imperial Back Fracture
• Sennen – Destroy Us
• Slow Club – Christmas ,Thanks For Nothing
• Bad Guys – Hips
• Elizabeth Fraser – Moses
• Fionn Regan – Protection Racket
• I Was King – Norman Bleik
• Lunar Youth – Misfits
• Papercuts – White Are The Waves
• Sad Day For Puppets – When You Tell Me That You Love Me / Withering Petals And Dust
• Slagsmalsklubben – Brutal Weapons
• The Very Best – Julia
• Twin Atlantic – What Is Light? Where Is Laughter?
• Two Door Cinema Club – I Can Talk (plus remixes)
• We Were Promised Jetpacks – It’s Thunder And It’s Lightning / Ships With Holes Will Sink
• Wounded Lion – Creatures In The Cave