Music reviews; The Verve, Nelly, Scouting for Girls, Primal Scream

SCOUTING FOR GIRLS: It’s Not About You. How many people have heard these words mumbled while being dumped? Scouting For Girls have grown quickly to become one of the best bands of their generation and this song of desperation and unfulfilled longing is another one that will be around for years

NELLY featuring ASHANTI and AKON: Body On Me. My grandma shared the same name as Nelly, but unlike him sadly didn’t sell 40m albums. This rap-laced soulful strut will be huge – or ‘grand’ as grandma used to say.

THE VERVE: Love Is Noise. Amazingly their first single in 10 years since 1998’s Sonnet. It’s the forerunner to their album, Forth, out next Monday. Riddled with strange sound effects which should do the trick by grabbing the attention by the scruff of its neck and slapping its face.

PHIL CAMPBELL: No Love Songs. A songsmith with a voice so fragile it’d shatter into a thousands fragments if you dropped it. Careful now.

NOAH AND THE WHALE: 5 Years Time. This is the kind of romantic folk beloved by mobile phone TV advertisers depicting fluffy people doing happy, sun-blessed things. Earnest, honest and simple with just the right amount of nursery rhyme jaunt to it.

THE KING BLUES: Let’s Hang The Landlord. Worrying sentiments from the Hackney collective that takes its cue from alternative folk and Clash-spirited punk.

PRIMAL SCREAM: Beautiful Future. Their career has now spanned more than a quarter of a century and this is their ninth studio album. It sets off at a seemingly cheery pace until you realise they’re singing about rather horrid things. Often a walk down new Millennium glam rock, but they can turn in hard-driven rock when they want as they do on the revved-up Can’t Go Back. They mooch around on the dancefloor with Uptown, cut a sinister swathe with Suicide Bomb and conspire with British folk icon Linda Thompson for a wistful, aching cover of Fleetwood Mac’s Over And Over. A band that can still challenge after all these years.

MELEE: Devils And Angels. It begins like Bruce Hornsby And The Range teaming up with the Beach Boys for a good old melodic burn-up down a dusty US highway, but as the album unfolds they get rockier and the pulling power gets weakened. You can sense the influences seeping out from the likes of ELO, the Eagles and US stadium rock.

VARIOUS: R&B Classics Collection. No less than 60 tracks spread across three CDs that range from the late 70s up to the present day. The names include the Sugarhill Gang, Rihanna, Pussycat Dolls, Nelly, Mary J Blige, LL Cool J, Bobby Brown, 2Pac, Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg, Ashanti and R Kelly.