Your correspondent isn’t a man for the horses. You won’t find us in the bookies on Gold Cup day, nor studiously examining the racing pages of The Star in our local at lunchtime. In fact, as we can neither eat nor wear anything from them, horses have little relevance to our existence.

Yet even we’ve noticed the unmistakable equine trend in French pop recently. Last year we featured Poney Express and their excellent single ‘Paris De Loin’. That’s “Paris from afar” and has nothing to do with your loins. Then there's a band called Poni Hoax but they're fairly bad. (You'll have noted so far a serious spelling difficulty for these two bands with the word 'pony'.)

And now, doubling the horsiness as if to prove the point, here’s Pony Pony Run Run. (We feel obliged to tell you that French people generally speak English quite well. It’s just that sometimes they’re terrible at naming bands.)

From Nantes on France’s Atlantic coast, PPRR (right) are a trio comprising Gaetan, Amael and Antoine. They’ve just released their first single, ‘Hey You’, and it’s a cracker – catchy dancefloor pop that marries too-cool-for-school indietronica to a swooning pop melody. We’re not too far from Phoenix here, and that’s always good for us.

PPRR’s first album, with the no-less-terrible title of ‘You Need Pony Pony Run Run’, is due out on 15 June. You can hear a couple of tracks from it on the band’s MySpace page. They’re due to tour around Europe in the autumn of 2009 – that is, if they survive a support slot to (eek!) Simple Minds in Arles on 11 July.

Oh yes, as we were saying, ‘Hey You’ is a fantastic song - here’s a homemade video for it:

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R.S.A.G. (live in Whelans, Dublin) Review Snapshot: Big fan of drum solos? Nah, me neither. Fortunately Jeremy Hickey, spotted above ground on a drum stool last weekend, kept the solos t...

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A review of the album 'Understanding Electricity' by Official Secrets Act Review Snapshot: Reasonable debut from the London art-rockers - with synth-stylings of the New Romantic era allied...

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Our regular readers will be familiar with Underground Railroad (below right), the London-based Paris trio whose fine US-style alt-rock earned them a place in our Best French Music of 2008 list. (Fight Like Apes fans may also have heard of them, the Irish band having toured the UK with them earlier this year.)

Well, Underground Railroad have just released a new E.P., 'Pick The Ghost', to follow up on the favourable reaction to last year's 'Sticks And Stones' album. It continues the good work of their previous record and is well worth a listen. That is, once you get past the slightly irritating but mercifully brief opener, 'Breakfast' and onto the four other tracks of top-quality Sonic Youth/JMC-esque indieness.

Those four songs ('Homeless Town', 'Lots Of Cars', 'Monday Morning' and the title track) confirm a theory we have about this band: they're much better when resident blokes Raphael Mura and J.B. Ganivet leave the singing to guitarist Marion Andrau. At the risk of generalisation, female singers tend to use their vocal range more than males, who are often more conservative in their singing. Like on their smashing 2008 single '25', Marion's warm, melodic voice plays off the dark sonic squall behind her, to great effect.

In New York during April 2009, Underground Railroad will be playing with Cold War Kids in the U.K., Netherlands and France in May. No news of any Irish dates for the moment.

You can listen to tracks old and new on Underground Railroad's MySpace page. For want of a new video from them, here's last year's '25' - great song, terrible video:

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