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Check out this new video from Soulsavers. We were listening to it this morning and Lisa asked me “Why are you listening to Johnny Cash?”

And if you didn’t know better, you’d swear that this was straight from the Man in Black himself. The singer is a guy called Mark Lanegan who definitely has the same cracked, husky voice that we associate with Cash.

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Swedish songwriter Jose Gonzales returns with another shimmering acoustic masterpiece, Down The Line.

There are two schools of though on Gonzales’ music - one that it’s monotonous and dull, the other that he produces sublime, dreamy acoustic songs supplemented with his very unique singing style.

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I don’t know what it is about Fossil McCartney, but I can’t stand the man. National treasure my arse. Didn’t like The Beatles, didn’t like Wings, didn’t like his solo stuff, didn’t like The Plastic Ono Band. OK, The Plastic Ono Band wasn’t his, but I thought I’d even things out for the outraged purists among you.

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Natalie’s always excelled at a certain brand of polished acoustic pop music, but she’s never managed to achieve quite the same heights of success as another Antipodean ex-soap actress I could mention.

Glorious follows in that tradition, with a major marketing push to remind us that 2007 marks Natalie’s 10th year as a minor league pop star. I read this quotable quote from Imbruglia over on Pop Music Kingdom:

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Allow me to introduce Mr Vince Freeman. Vince is one of those aspiring singer/songwriters I came across on MySpace a while back and have been meaning to tell you all about.

Vince is my kind of singer - he’s got a raw, throaty vocal style, but as you’ll hear, there’s a real warmth in his tone as well.

He also gigs extensively, and at the moment he’s in the middle of doing an ‘In Your Lounge’ tour, where he turns up at intimate venues like people’s houses and performs for them.

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The blurb on Faulkner’s website would lead you to believe that his musical style is breaking major new ground. “What?s that sound?”, they gush, “It?s acoustic guitar like we?ve never heard it before. It?s things done to six strings that will boggle the ears and eyes.”

They witter on about Faulkner’s ‘tapping’ style like Eddie Van Halen didn’t popularize that nearly 30 years ago. But then musician websites are notoriously full of bullshit like that. Read more & comment »

I wrote back in April about Stuart Revnell - an unsigned singer/songwriter from London who’s got a great pop rock sound.

Well, Stuart has released another song on his website and on MySpace. The new song is called Off My Mind. Having listened to Stuart’s other material, I can say for sure that Stuart has his own distinctive style.

Once again, in addition to writing and performing the song, Stuart engineered and produced it himself.

He has also - in his generosity - made the MP3 available on his personal website. If you loved Stuart’s material after my initial interview, you’re bound to enjoy this track.

Amerie. An artist with a deadly fear of wearing trousers. She looks a bit like Myleene Klass, doesn’t she? I sometimes like to imagine she’s from a parallel universe where Myleene had a music career instead of doing the lad’s mag circuit and taking cold showers in the jungle. Still, both girls run around in their pants a lot.

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Continuing my obsessive Exteme fanboy thing, I looked up Gary Cherone on MySpace this evening.

After Gary left Extreme, he joined Van Halen for a short while, although I think he joined the band at a bad time in their career and wasn’t particularly well received as frontman.

He’s done some solo recording, and been involved with his brother in a The Who tribute band. (He’s not the only rocker to do the cover tribute band thing - Joe Elliott from Def Leppard had a side project called Cybernauts)

Recently, Gary seems to be involved with a band called hurtsmile, a group which also features his brother Markus. I listened to a few of their tunes on MySpace, and it’s great to hear Gary’s distinctive voice again. It seems to be more straight rock than his solo material, I’ll be interested to see how they develop. I think it’s seriously early days for the band, because they don’t have any group shots, logos or identity yet.

Relatively unknown acoustic guitarist Kate Walsh has knocked Take That’s Shine off the top of the iTunes download album chart - but does not even own an iPod.

Kate is a true internet success story, she built her fan base simply by putting her music onto her myspace site and eventually managed to persuade iTunes to sell it. She has admitted to being as shocked as everyone else, that her homemade album has been downloaded from iTunes this week, more times than Take That or the Kaiser Chiefs’ Ruby.

Kate told The Times: “You end up looking at it every day to see if you’re still number one. I think I’m ahead of Elton.

“I don’t actually have an iPod yet. I hear they are quite good for ten hour flights.

“I set up my own record label called Blueberry Pie and just got the music out there. It’s pretty easy. Anyone can do it.”