The tone of Fyfe Dangerfield’s Fly Yellow Moon is introduced in the opening track’s lyric: ‘I can’t help it if I’m happy.’ The album, the first offering form the Guillemots front man is unapologetically uplifting throughout. The track in question is a high octane pop number featuring quirky electronics, piano thrashing and an effortlessly energetic vocal; it’s as good an opener as we’ll hear all year. The rest of the album follows suit, maintaining the joyous aesthetic through an eclectic mix of pop-folk ditties. Elements of Nick Drake and John Martyn can be heard in songs like ‘Firebird’ and ‘Don’t be shy’, whose delicate, sensitive air is more heart-warming than melancholy. At times the track listing feels a little disparate, jumping between styles from one song to the next. However, the album is undoubtedly a great achievement… and get this – it was recorded in only five days!

4 Stars

They call themselves the anti-Gallaghers, which might explain why they sound quite a lot like Bloc Party. But Delphic are more than just openers for their more illustrious tour partners. Encouragingly, they seem to avoid easy catergorisation. Too dance to be indie, too many guitars to be just club music, they fuse the genres in a more natural way than Bloc Party managed on Intimacy, their own electronica effort.

Opener ‘Clarion Call’ is exactly what it claims to be, and although single ‘Doubt’ does open very similarly to BP’s ‘Hunting For Witches’, the vocals are sometimes more reminiscent of Tom Vek, (incidentally, the vocal effects on ‘Red Lights’, compared with Vek’s ‘Nothing But Green Lights’, are similar, and there is an obvious thematic connection) with a chorus which is more like that of a club classic than anything else. The instrumental title-track perhaps most adeptly showcases their dance potential, an epic which spends three minutes building up until it breaks out into a full on rave, compelling beats underpinned all the way by glorious harmonies – and through 8:51 minutes, it never drags.

Sometimes the lyrics lack originality – the opening lines of ‘Halcyon’ are lifted almost directly from Radiohead’s ‘Idioteque,’ the concept of a band asking for ‘something that I can believe in’ is not exactly unheard of, and this song and others (like ‘Counterpoint’) are dependent on compelling drum hooks introduced halfway through to carry them convincingly.

Its a shame that a band with so many great original ideas slip into cliché occasionally, but more often than not, their ideas are rendered with such conviction that they avoid this problem – ‘Clarion Call’ is a case in point. Another is single ‘This Momentary’ – their statement of intent. It has more than a passing semblance in both purpose and musicality to The Gloaming by Radiohead. There the refrain was ‘Your alarm bells/They should be ringing.’ Delphic have a more optimistic outlook, and their imperative is ‘Lets do something real.’ And they duly deliver.

4 stars (8.5)

Vampire Weekend are what they are, and are not ashamed of it. If you liked their first album, this doesn’t disappoint. Musically, VW still have a tendency towards a thin sound, even if they are admittedly catchy. Some stringed orchestration attempts to solve this (‘Taxi Cab’, ‘I Think Ur A Contra’), sometimes a brass section is the medicine (‘Run’), but generally the production tends towards twitchy electronic music.

‘California English’ has front-man Ezra Koenig doing his best Animal Collective impression (imagine Panda Bear on autotune) and ‘White Sky’ – an album highlight – is all about the blips and beeps. That is, until a catchy falsetto chorus to guarantee insanity come the inevitable incessant-summer-festival-repetition (think the effect of ‘A-Punk’, on helium.) ‘Cousins’ is an astute choice for lead single, tremolo riffing and machine-gun drumbeats adding energy which is sometimes lacking from Vampire Weekend’s setlists.

Lyrically, Koenig is still slightly lost in an Ivy-League world, yet he’s definitely more self-aware; when you name your album after Nicaraguan counter-revolutionaries as a response to The Clash, you’d hope their pre-occupations would extend beyond minor grammatical errors and New York bus routes. ‘Holiday’ is close to being as thematically bland as the title suggest, yet lyrics like ‘She never seen an AK/In a yellowy Day Glo display’ suggest a sense of irony. The implication that Koenig has seen an AK, or anything close, might raise a wry smile. But they aren’t exactly Rage, and don’t pretend to be. Judging by a sold-out UK tour, that doesn’t matter, to them or their fans.

4 stars (7.7)

Last week the Royal Mail issued a set of ten souvenir stamps, each celebrating a ‘classic album cover.’ The collection, which features ‘some of the most potent graphic images of modern times,’ has been welcomed by many (including Led Zep’s Jimmy Page) but to me, it’s a sad reminder that album art is now seen as a relic – a once-great institution now only worth enjoying on a thumb-nail-sized adhesive; one that peaked decades ago – its glow casting a shadow over subsequent output.

Only recently, Peter Saville – the man responsible for Factory Records’ artwork – told the Independent on Sunday, ‘Cover art is now dead…’ Ouch. It’s true that the album art institution has faced battles: not only did it have to deal with its physical downsize (from Vinyl to CD) but the emergence of minidisk and MP3, and most significantly, the profusion of illegal downloading, have meant the production of credible, viable, even radical album art has become less of a priority for major record labels.

Cynics note the abundance of CDs on HMV’s shelves whose covers are less a product of Andy Warhol and more an OK Magazine photo shoot. However, they fail to recognise the plethora of innovative, thought provoking and sometimes interactive will-be classics that grace us with their presence.

Let’s take Blur’s Think Tank as an example: an album more recent than any featured by Royal Mail’s collection, its cover art comes courtesy of enigmatic street artist Banksy. The image, which is in his staple stencil-style, shows the embrace of a man and woman, each wearing old-school breathing apparatus – or is it? To be honest, it’s hard to tell what’s going on, and that’s part of the appeal. I appreciate many may not like the image, or any of his corpus for that matter, but this isn’t the point. Banksy, whether we like it or not, has an urban appeal that has captured a generation. Although less esteemed than Warhol, who created the iconic image on The Velvet Underground’s debut, he undoubtedly taps into the zeitgeist of the noughties; the image itself, as enigmatic and provocative as any seen in the ‘golden age’ of album art.

Radiohead’s 2001 release Amnesiac marked a pivotal point in album art’s story. Rather than being released in the orthodox plastic box, the CD came in a hardback book whose pages were filled with the surreal illustrations of long time collaborator Stanley Donwood. Not only is the art featured fascinating in its own right – exhibitions of Donwood’s work have received glowing reviews in recent years – but it leaves the beholder with an impression that here, the art is far from secondary to the music; the images and music are inextricably connected; Amnesiac is not just a sonic experience, but a visual one also – a multi media package bound in a felt-finish book.

The same can be said of pop masters Bjork and Sigur Ros, whose albums are sought after as much for their cover art as their sounds. Both these Icelandic acts are artists first and last – for them the artwork is bound up in a work’s overall ‘package’ and no part of it is left to chance. Sigur Ros, until recently generated all their album art themselves. The works elicited discussion on their minimalist and mystifying composition, and offer a fascinating incite into the band’s psyche. Their last album Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust

used a picture by the acclaimed American photographer Ryan McGinley showing four nude figures running across a road. Despite the band claiming the picture echoes one of the album’s themes, ‘the celebration of the natural,’ high street retailers censored it – an action that thirty years ago would have instantly elevated it to ‘classic’ status.

Animal collective’s acclaimed 2009 opus Merriweather Post Pavilion has equally provocative album art. The cover design sounds simple – lines of bright green ovals on a purple and pink backdrop – but after a moment’s inspection its inventiveness is apparent. As we look at the design, the patterns change. The ovals ebb and flow as we pan across, creating an uncomfortably trippy, kinetic experience. The design is inspired by the work of Japanese psychologist Akiyoshi Kitaoka who earned his PHD studying visual perception. Posting on music blog Popdose, reviewer Talor Long says: ‘it appears to be in motion when we know it’s stationary. It’s an apt representation of the album’s duelling thematic components: fantasy versus reality, whimsy versus obligation, restlessness versus tranquillity.’ Again, we see modern, mainstream album art that supports its work’s musical content whilst innovating artistically – it deserves a place in the same album art canon as Sgt. Pepper’s and Dark Side of the Moon…doesn’t it?

Of course, these are just a few isolated examples within a broad sweep of current mainstream album art. A richer vein of artistic prowess is to be found in the more left field market; a trawl through some of London’s backstreet record shops is likely to expose an even more iconoclastic and virtuosic artistic repertoire. Who said album art is dead?

In some ways, Hot Chip’s music is a strange dichotomy; its sound is an embodiment of both accessibility and experimentation – normally two mutually exclusive features in our world of Jedwards and JLSs. They’ve achieved that rare feat in music: as well as being unashamedly radio-friendly, the music is intelligent; the cerebral and visceral are in a state of equilibrium; listeners can bask in the beat-driven sounds, or they can analyse the hell out of the clever use of compression on the kick drum… Few bands do pop like Hot Chip.

I chatted to Joe Goddard, one half of the creative duo within the five-piece. He and lead vocalist Alexis Taylor have managed all creative responsibilities since the group’s inception eighteen years ago. After becoming friends in their first year at Elliot School, they’d hang out listening to Pavement and recording acoustic guitars on a four-track; the name Hot Chip was set in stone even back then. Joe tells me about the school which itself is an institution famed for its musical pedigree: its alumni include enigmatic dub step pioneer Burial, electonica wunderkind Four Tet and indie darlings The XX and The Maccabees. “It was a big liberal comprehensive that instilled the idea that you could do anything with your life.” He recalls how he and Kieran Hebden (a.k.a. Four Tet) would “introduce each other to new records” and “go and see shows all around London.”

In fact it’s through this extant friendship that Hot Chip had its break; Hebden passed the group’s demos to London label Moshi Moshi who were quick to put the band on its roster. Despite the new contract, Hot Chip didn’t indulge in state-of-the-art studios and cutting edge producers. The first two albums, 2004’s Coming On Strong and 2006’s seminal The Warning, were both recorded on laptops in the band members’ bedrooms, using the unfashionable music program Steinberg Cubase (think GCSE music lessons). Joe admits, “it’s seen as pretty old” but uses it because “he doesn’t have to look anything up in the manual.” He expresses his disillusionment at musicians’ tendencies to hop between the latest music software “never being comfortable with any one thing” and producing poorer music as a result.

Like its predecessor Made in The Dark, the band’s soon to be released album One Life Stand was recorded in more conventional spaces. The band assembled its own studio in a disused London industrial estate, only for it to be burnt to a crisp by a freak fire in 2008. Fortunately, the studio was restored and equipped with a glut of vintage gear in time for the recording sessions that produced songs “inspired by lots of different kinds of soul music from different times and places.” The band wanted to make something “more concise than Made in The Dark” which was apparently too disparate: “it changes from pop to folk to crazy ravey…this time we wanted to make something more of-a-piece.” One Life Stand features more live instrumentation than its predecessors, perhaps offering an antidote to what Joe describes as “aggressive, processed, digital dance music.”

For the recording sessions which began in spring last year, the band decided once again to work without a producer, favouring instead the Goddard-Taylor unity: “The production’s my favourite part of the whole process…I’d be loath to give it up.” Goddard does suggest he might be tempted if they found someone who changed the way they work, rather than the work itself, but concedes, “It would be difficult to find someone we trust enough.” I wondered how, without an exterior presence, Hot Chip maintains a balance between accessibility and experimentalism, the union of which, to me, is a defining feature of its music. “Both aspects are important to us…we want something that works as a pop song but has some strangeness.” He tells me how the personalities within the duo complement each other, “if one of us is doing something that’s too experimental, the other will rein it in…so it gets to the point a bit quicker.”

The group has just started rehearsals for its imminent tour of Europe where the songs will undergo further transmogrifications, as they do in all of Hot Chip’s live shows. Joe sounds enthused when he talks of the “potential for experimentation in a live setting.” He recognises that gig-goers are willing to wait for the pay off in a song…it’s about building and releasing tension in a way that wouldn’t work on CD.” He finds it “dull when you go to a gig and the band essentially plays its record with no live elements.”

It’s evident from our chat that there’s something unique about the way Hot Chip thinks about music – a distinction that inevitably manifests itself in the sounds it produces. Joe has a jibe at the ordinary sounds that are becoming ubiquitous in the pop landscape due to the likes of X Factor: “it’s a nasty business. Terribly run-of-the-mill music made by pretty boys and girls with normal sounding voices,” yet I get the impression he doesn’t think about it much; all Hot Chip really cares about is making music – if a fire incinerating their studio doesn’t distract them, “pretty girls and boys” haven’t got a chance.