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So – Praxis, god damn his withered soul, has infected me with the memespack:

“List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.“

It’s been going around.

So, I have consulted the oracle (I remember at NotCon four years ago, listening to Richard Jones explaining Audioscrobbler. “Ha,” I mocked, completely missing the point, “so it notes down what you listen to, and after a while, it’s able to tell you what music you like. What’s the point of that?” Quite a lot of point, it turns out.) and had a think, and here’s my seven:

1. Ready For The Floor by Hot Chip. It’s been a while now since Made In The Dark dropped (oooh, I said an album “dropped”! Like a proper music blogger!) and the verdict is pretty much that it’s not as good as The Warning, but it’s rather fine nonetheless. One Pure Thought, Bendable Poseable and this one are the songs that get repeated play. This one especially, because it’s excellent.

2. Kim & Jessie by M83. I’ll be honest, I’m not entirely sure what’s going on here. Some French electronic bloke seems to have decided to make a record by playing every single noise made during the eighties all at once. It’s ridiculously overblown and it’s subtle and it’s weird and it’s pop all at the same time, it’s synth-rock and it’s shoegazey and, yes, there’s a bit where it sounds kind of like Air but then most of it doesn’t really sound like Air, even when they went a bit odd, and the whole thing confuses me and cheers me up. It’s not an aberration, either – large sections of the album sound like Tears For Fears covering Bat For Lashes. Or the other way round. Bat For Fears? Tears For Lashes? One of those is the plot of Batman Begins, the other describes the emotional complexity of a Sub/Dom relationship. Anyway, yes. Funny people, the French.

3. Time To Pretend by MGMT. I’m just going to quote Graham Linehan on this one:

I’ve been loving this song for a while now, but this video has turned MGMT into my new favourite band. As Spinal Tap said, there’s a thin line between clever and stupid, and this video hoovers that line right up. It’s so daringly, hilariously pretentious that it just leaps out of our world and immediately enters them into the orbiting hall of lunatic rock fame. Think Bowie walking along the beach dressed as a Pierrot clown (My Dad, from the armchair: “Oh, for God’s sake�), or even The Jacksons as space giants, and you get the idea.

On the downside, the useless spunkrags won’t allow embedding of the video in question, so you’ve got to actually click the bloody link to see their stupid video.

4. Party Hard by Andrew W.K. Because sometimes, you need to party. And when you do, hard should be the manner in which you do it. Thus was it written.

5. Something Somewhere by Sparky’s Magic Piano. I’ve mentioned before on this blog that it’s a real pleasure when friends of yours do something that’s actually really rather good, so you can be genuinely enthusiastic without the burden of being polite and twisting your face into a hideous rictus grin as your force yourself to burble “yeah, I totally liked it, nice job, I’d pay for that even if I wasn’t your mate oh is that the time must be off bye”. The entire album by my close personal showbiz chums Sparky’s is well worth a listen, but this track is the one that sounds exactly like Spring pulling itself together and deciding to become Summer. Especially good is the way it starts out a bit discordant, then becomes a lot more cordant.

Sparky’s Magic Piano – Something Somewhere

Click the little button to play. Oh, also, they’ve got a gig this Saturday at The Miller, near London Bridge. If you’re in the area, come along…

6. America Will Punch You by ShiSho. Okay, so I just discovered this today, via Joe (who got it from MartinSFP on Twitter.) What’s to say? Two little girls chirpily describing all the things America will punch, in the homemade lo-fi style. There’s clearly some evil music marketing genius at work behind this, deciding to go for broke on the recent trend for yelpy underage punka, but it matters little – stuff like this is basically the reason why humans come with ears fitted as standard,

7. You Are The Generation That Bought More Shoes And You Get What You Deserve by Johnny Boy. It’s, like, four years old now, and I completely missed it when it came out, and it’s basically the only wise thing Johnny Boy have done in their career… but I will fight anybody who tries to deny that it’s one of the great pop songs of the 2000s. Gorgeously sung tinkly Spector consumer-apocalypse melodrama that becomes an irresistible chant of euphoric cynicism. Oh, and it nicks the “Boom. Boom-boom. Snap” intro of Be My Baby. Perfect.

Just missing out: The Age Of The Understatement by The Last Shadow Puppets, because it’s sort of a bit wintery.

So there you go. This meme should probably be killed right now before it becomes an epidemic (as Chicken Yoghurt so wisely did), but I can’t resist at least tormenting qwghlm and division6 with it. So there.