Since my last blog post I’ve been acquainting myself with the music of Pearl and the Puppets. Her latest single ‘Because I Do’ is catchy but not too dissimilar to the sound of Feist. Still some quality songs to be heard on her MySpace here, and I'm in no doubt that she's definitely one to watch.

And, as I’m sure you’ll be interested to know the most mundane (but in my case terrifying) eventuality of getting a tooth taken out caused me to ponder about what would be a good play list for while you’re in the dentist’s chair. Well, that and minimising my sugar intake. And, as your ever intrepid blogger, I compiled this list:

• Nick Drake - Sunday (A nice instrumental song to almost relax you before your teeth begin being drilled in to)
• Blur - Trimm Trabb (A mellow but somewhat euphoric track is always a necessity in such a situation)
• The Courteeners - Will It Be This Way Forever? (Nothing like listening to a song about naivety and adolescence  to distract you for a bit)
• Elbow - Not A Job (Depending on how loud the drilling/pliers are, can be quite effective for making your mind wander)
• The Cure - Forest (Vivid imagery, Robert Smith’s eerie voice - need I say more?)
• The Beatles - Being For The Benefit of Mr. Kite (Instantly effective, sing along if you’d like to show off your vocal skills/snap a tooth)
• Arcade Fire - Windowsill (Can make you feel more depressed than scared, you’ll be like Tommy Tiernan when Radiohead started playing on the bus from Craggy Island. So when your teeth are being hacked at, you won’t notice a thing!)                  

No, you don’t have to thank me, thank your teeth the next time they decide to start warring each other. And while we’re on the subject of tooth extractions here’s Green Day’s video for 'Geek Stink Breath'. (Best not to look at this video if you’re of a nervous disposition/are about to have a tooth taken out!)

 

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Your correspondent predicts that from next week French electronica will have yet another global star. His name will be Arnaud Bernard, his first name reversed to give the nom de pop of Onra.

How do we know this? Well, because next Monday (24 May) Onra will release his new album, 'Long Distance'. It's brilliant, and it should make him very popular indeed.

Truth be told, Onra (right) isn't a complete unknown. He became something of a cult hero on the blogosphere with his 2007 album 'Chinoiseries'. The title is a French-ism that suggests 'Chinese stuff' but actually means 'bureaucratic red tape', and the music was inspired by old Oriental pop records he picked up while visiting Vietnam, his father's homeland.

Now back in Paris, Onra's attention has turned from east to west. 'Long Distance' is drenched in the old-school dancefloor sounds of Detroit and New York. One track, 'WeeOut', starts with a burst of good old-fashioned scratching before laying down some très '80s beats and synths. Other tracks are more soulful, like 'Oper8tor', 'High Hopes' and the title track. And the whole thing fizzes with electronica. To say it's certain to be the best French album of 2010 feels like we're damning Onra with faint praise.

As it happens, the record is coming out on Dublin label All City Records, so we can make an adopted Irish artist of him. He's even launching the album in Dublin, with a show at Twisted Pepper on Abbey Street next Friday (28 May). G'wan Oirland!

On a related note, the Irish-speakers among you will have noticed that 'Onra' sounds exactly like 'anraith', the word as Gaeilge for 'soup' (hence the title pun). Wouldn't it be gas, right, if he was doing a show in the Gaeltacht and he went for dinner beforehand, and for his starter he asks for the soup, because he's Onra and the soup is anraith and that's him and... Oh wait: this presupposes that he'd be ordering in Irish. And what if he decides to have the salad instead? Well, maybe because he doesn't speak Irish he thinks the server is asking his name instead of his order and he says 'Onra' and instead he gets soup! Wouldn't it be wild? Or what if-

CLUAS gaffer: Just post the link and the tune, you eejit!

Um, right. To prepare for the album launch in Dublin next Friday you can hear some of 'Long Distance' on Onra's MySpace page. Here's 'High Hopes'. Twenty-five seconds in, what does that keyboard riff remind you of?

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I think we’ve probably all seen the Discover Ireland ads with the catchy Tegan and Sara-esque song with the lyrics “I need to go/I need to get away from everything.” This song is of course ‘Remember When’ by Heathers. It seems that adverts are the perfect launch pad for indie artists, let’s not forget Feist’s adoration after her track ‘1234’ was used on the iPod ad.

This method causes the song to beam into both peoples homes and hopefully their consciousness. When Gossip’s ‘Standing In The Way Of Control’ was used as the main song for the first series of teen drama Skins it shot up into the charts.

And of course The Fray and Cold War Kids owe a lot of their popularity and success to Scrubs for frequently using their songs. The Fray’s ‘How To Save A Life’ and Cold War Kids’ ‘Hospital Beds’ were used to regularly in both the show and the accompanying promo ads for the programme.

Florence and the Machine’s ‘Cosmic Love’ has recently been renamed as ‘that song from the O2 ad’. A song which people who are only familiar with it from the ads only know a portion of, and we all know how dreary it is to listen to the whole song when you know five words absolutely perfectly and the rest may as well be yodelling.

This does cause me to wonder if this gives some bands a restricted shelf life, if they’re destined to be ‘that band from that [insert company name here] ad’ and that all of their future work could pale in comparison.

After the major success of Gossip’s ‘Standing In The Way of Control’ their following singles and album can be described as mediocre as best. But who knows, maybe had I not heard ‘Standing In The Way Of Control’ so many times that my ears began to bleed I might appreciate their music more. Or, alternatively, they didn’t let their song be used on Skins and I would never have even been aware of their existence.

The use of relatively unknown artists’ songs being used in the media is no new phenomenon. Now many companies are trying to appeal to a younger, more bohemian demographic. And being inhabitants of the information age means all of this is more accessible, and more predominant than ever.

Is it really much of a dilemma though? Yes, using a song of yours on an advert (assuming it gets chosen) could mean that you’re only remembered for one song and the rest of your music could be ignored, or you could forever play music and write songs while getting almost no recognition and make no living from it. Who came blame a band for having ambition, and getting an enviable amount of money in the process?

As long as Bonnie Tyler stops appearing on screen advertising credit cards while looking like a ghost from the netherworld then I generally find advert music to be pretty good. Certainly the less songs by Johnny Logan afflicting my ears and more by relatively unknown bands the better.
 

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At first glance, Parisian four-piece Gush seem like a French equivalent to Kings Of Leon. The band members are all related - brothers Xavier and Vincent Polycarpe plus their cousins Mathieu Parnaud and Yan Gorodetzky. Also, their fashion sense is more back-woods than Left Bank: shaggy hair, vintage leather and the sort of long-sleeve, round-neck, three-button T-shirt that Grizzly Adams would wear as an undergarment.

But soundwise Gush (right) don't follow the Followills down the road of southern-fried blues-rock. The four French lads are certainly retro, but their thing is post-Beatles pop and folk-rock - say, the very early Lennon or McCartney solo stuff, later Beach Boys or a bit of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. The storming semi-acoustic rocker 'No Way', reinforced with steely harmonies, shows the strength of those influences to best effect. Still, don't discount the novelty of Frenchmen who actually sing and write melodies.

Gush are starting to make a stir in France. Recently they released their first album, 'Everybody's God' (Irish music fans may remember a Donegal band called Georgia who had a record of the same name in the early '90s) and an upcoming Paris show at the sizeable Cigale has already sold out. Now they're picking up airplay with a strange and distinctive single that's a little different to the rest of their tracks.

On paper, 'Let's Burn Again' promises to be vastly uncool - it has the upper-register backing harmonies and staccato keyboards of mid-Atlantic, middle-of-the-road '70s pop. Fortunately, music isn't made on paper: 'Let's Burn Again' sounds so odd and unhip that it's almost fascinating, especially when you try to match the sound to the look of the band.

You can hear more on the Gush MySpace page. Make sure you listen to both tracks we mentioned, 'Let's Burn Again' and 'No Way' - quite different but each charming in its way. Which one will we choose for our video? The strange, unhip one with keyboards, of course! Here's 'Let's Burn Again':

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French summer music festivals tend to be smaller than their international counterparts. There's certainly no Gallic event that compares in size to Roskilde, Sziget, Werchter or Glastonbury. La Route du Rock, for instance, only ever has around two dozen acts.

Perhaps the biggest summer music festival in France is Eurockéennes, which takes place on the first weekend of July near the eastern city of Belfort. This year's four-day event will have around 80 acts - plenty of whom are top-quality marquee names. And the festival's spectacular lakeside setting guarantees a memorable experience.

The first day, Thursday 1 July, is a starter ahead of the main course. To serenade punters as they arrive from all round Europe, those enjoyable Icelandic electropoppers FM Belfast will play in one of the festival campsites.

Real business begins on Friday 2 July. Jay-Z and Missy Elliot bring the bling-bling of genuine rap/R n'B superstars, while Charlotte Gainsbourg supplies some home-grown glamour. Also on the bill that day and night: Hot Chip, Foals, Kasabian, Patrick Watson, The Black Keys and our own Two Door Cinema Club in what seems to be their now-fortnightly French gig.

Saturday's notional headliners are The Hives but the real draw that night will surely be The Specials, The XX and Broken Social Scene. A strong French side for that day's line-up features Vitalic, Emilie Simon and General Elektriks. Further down the running order are Memory Tapes, also worth catching.

A quaint Eurockeennes tradition is to make the last night's headliner a real stinker, to cater for those who need to skip out early for the last bus or train. Last year it was Slipknot; this year it's Mika. But the rest of Sunday's line-up is stuffed with quality. Massive Attack and Martina Topley-Bird are on trip-hop duty; LCD Soundsystem and Empire Of The Sun serve up electro-pop, an Ethiopiques show should sound blissful on a summer afternoon, and there are some indie gems like Health, Fuck Buttons and The Middle East to be found here and there.

A weekend pass costs only €95 and a single day's ticket costs just €39. Camping on the festival site is free for ticket-holders to a limit of 12,000 people. If you book early enough to get a cheap Queasyjet flight to nearby Mulhouse, you could be lucky enough to secure your entire festival weekend in sunny France, travel included, for less than the price of an Irish festival ticket. (In addition, there are special bus + ticket packages to bring punters from most major French cities.)

Full details in English are available on the Eurockeennes 2010 website. Here's 'The Songs That We Sing' by this year's biggest French name, Charlotte Gainsbourg. Neighbour of ours, don't you know:

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