The Golden Filter sound icily attractive and sharply attired, but several singles in and there is scant photographic evidence to support this supposition.

The Golden Filter - Thunderbird

Maybe they are horribly disfigured. Or invisible. Or just shy. This new video for Thunderbird doesn't offer any clues. Unless they are that hooded thing on the beach with long fingers. In which case they are scary.

I asked them what this song is about and they said "Thunderbird IS a purification ceremony." So now you know. Buy the single now on Dummy.

Read more (less oblique) musings from The Golden Filter at Pinglewood, where you can also grab a free MP3 of Thunderbird.

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Cough Cool is Dan Svizeny. He's probably cool for a million reasons, but here are three to begin with. He's from a town called New Hope. He's in the awesome Nude Beach. He named his solo project after an amazing song by The Misfits.

Svizeny can shred and builds towering, wall-of-drone bedroom jams, but here he shows his tender side with a true-hearted ballad. He explains: "Girl Tell Me is about a girl. It's my attempt to combine Sarah by Ween and Girl Don't Tell Me by The Beach Boys. It obviously went horribly wrong."

Download Cough Cool’s Girl Tell Me here.

Hear more from Cough Cool at Pinglewood.

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Ungdomskulen are proof that living in a country where night is longer than day will eventually drive you nuts.

Ungdomskulen - Idunno

Their name means youth school and they rattle around with impish menace, plying young innocents with their demented brand of dancefloor jerk punk. Their new single, the first from their second album, is about feckless ambiguity, but the video is mainly about a pair of white trainers.

Idunno is out soon on the brand new and already awesome NIKA label.

Here is an exclusive remix from the supremely excellent Gold Panda. Feel the woodblock.

Download Ungdomskulen’s Idunno (Gold Panda remix) here.

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When Luther Vandross and Janet Jackson sang about how the best things in life are free they probably didn’t mean first-class rail travel, but I am a shameless freeloader and that song speaks to me.

At the moment, Eurostar is running a campaign called Little Break, Big Difference. The people who work there are clearly all handsome and wise because they gave me a pair of tickets to go wherever I wanted. I decided to head to Paris to catch Tune-Yards support the awesome Dirty Projectors.

[Tune-Yards with feathers]

Tune-Yards album, BiRd-BrAiNs is a beguiling clash of low-fidelity and high ambitions. Made on a digital voice recorder it blends field recordings, the lovelorn lilt of a ukulele and Merrill Garbus’ remarkable voice. Tune-Yards is Garbus' solo project, but it sounds like the work of many. It sounds like campfire folk music and African hip-hop and deep south spirituals and sultry R&B, often all at the same time.

On stage at La Maroquinerie, Garbus gamely tries out her French on the audience. She seems the fearless sort, a one-woman-band, like Juana Molina, but her songs are less woozy, more awake.

She makes beats and backing tracks by looping what she plays into a microphone, often discarding what she's built to play acapella before the loops come crashing back. But it's her voice, her extraordinary range and the powerful way she throws it around that has the Parisian crowd in raptures, demanding an encore. Singing like that is not easy, she says.

[this photo was not taken in Paris, but you get the idea]

"Sunlight was recorded in my bedroom," she explained to me before the show. "But my voice was in horrible shape. It really hurt to sing. I had this idea for a song, and I had looped this drum thing that I had recorded.

"I was so excited about recording after a long time of not doing it, and I decided to sing as much as I could, just to continue my work on the song. I think I did the quiet verses first, then let my voice rest a couple of days, then did the others and didn’t sing for days after that. Stupid musician machismo.

“In any case, I am very lucky to still have vocal chords that are intact. It’s funny because I just never got a chance to redo those vocals, and now in criticisms of the song, reviewers will be like, ‘the first couple of minutes don’t exactly highlight her voice’ and I have to agree with them, but man, try singing on tour for months and then recording an album. You try it!”

Download Tune-Yards’s Sunlight here.

Read more from Tune-Yards at Pinglewood.

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"It is about a teacher I had freshman year," says Perfume Genius, "he was also my wrestling coach." Everyone has teachers they remember, but they're not all like Mr Petersen.

Perfume Genius writes songs that are stripped bare and trembling like exposed, raw nerves. "He let me smoke weed in his truck," he sings, then "he made me a tape of Joy Division." Mr Petersen sounds like he might be an awesome guy, but then again...

Download Perfume Genius’s Mr Petersen here.

Read more from Perfume Genius at Pinglewood.

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Becoming Real is the perfect name for Londoner Toby Ridler's exotic sonic experiments. His songs sound like they're undergoing a miraculous metamorphosis, as though they've awoken from uneasy dreams to find themselves transformed into something monstrous and amazing.

"I guess Becoming Real started when I was about 16," he says. "Not that I really knew it at the time, but that's when I started to develop my ideas."

(Pic chosen by Toby: "It kinda fits with the Becoming Real name.")

His song Tracy Chapman, a delirious, galactic ballad, may draw twisted inspiration from the Fast Car-driving American songwriter, but it was written for the oldest of reasons. "The idea came when I met this awesome girl called Rosalind, and I guess I wanted to impress her, so I tried to write a song, but it kinda wrote itself," he explains. "I don't think it really impressed her now I think about it. I think it impressed me more which is kind of depressing."

Listen to Becoming Real's Tracy Chapman here.

Read more from Becoming Real and grab his amazing cover of Womack and Womack's Teardrops at Pinglewood.

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