Sometimes sad is good

Just listening to this thing by South London griefsters Stubborn Heart ('I Need Love'), and I'm struck - yet again - by how beautiful it is. It's also very slight in places - double-tracked harmonies barely held up by a clicking beat track Radiohead will be back for any second, and a lot of cooing. God, it's light on laughs, but then in come the pianos, and it develops a sort of strut, like it's just banged the phone down on the ex in question, thrown its coat on and headed for town.

Stubborn Heart: maudlin, but brilliant

It's in a similar mould to the stuff I've heard by Jai Paul - again, link below, folks - which pushes similar buttons to the above, only doing so while wearing a pair of crushed-velvet disco gloves on a lend from Prince. Despite apparently being so cool as to barely exist and having taken just over two years to release two tracks, South Londoner Jai is being given the come-hither by Jay Z, P Diddy and a taxi-queue-sized litany of great-and-gooders with lots of cash and spare initials. He certainly has the attention of They, and They want to see what he does next.

Jai Paul: more than just a sadsack bloke in a blazer

On the basis of Jasmine, which borrows a bit of the Purple one's guitar style, some Al Greenisms and a stack of crusty old reverb, he's spent most of the time between this and his first release pouring pints of unctuous distortion into the back of an assortment of amplifiers, which have then been thrown down a treacle mine and covered in moss. It really is a head-turning bit of production, this - genuinely unlike anything I've heard before, while at the same time being sufficiently familiar to make you wonder why the hell no one arrived at it previously. The future (heck, even the present) may be a little unclear, sonically, but this bloke has got something. Now if only someone could convince him to release some more songs, we might be getting somewhere. On this evidence, expect a brilliant, fully formed debut album sometime around late 2044.