Patrick Kelleher - You Look Cold (Osaka)

The 24-year-old Wicklow singer has emerged without fanfare with an album bound to earn a Choice nomination next year.

An exquisite collection that flits from genre to genre seamlessly, Kelleher could well be the closest Irish music gets to a Sufjan Stevens figure.

The lo-fi production — 80s keyboards, cheapo drum machine — serves to accentuate the homemade qualities of songs that succeed in sounding meticulously crafted without being laboured over.

Kelleher's influences would appear to range from Talking Heads to the more daring side of hip-hop and on He Has to Sleep Sometime he has created a slacker anthem for the recession generation.

Burn it: He has to Sleep Sometime

Amazing Baby - Rewild (V2)

The Brooklyn-based outfit attended the same college (Connecticut's Wesleyan University) as the oh-so-hip Chairlift and the gap-year set's band of choice MGMT, and they channel the same sort of genre-hopping electronica that those two outfits so successfully mined.

Rewild boasts a handful of tracks that go some way towards matching the hype, with Bayonnet's electro-glam stomp packing quite a punch, while Invisible Place sounds a mid-period Pink Floyd number. Best of the bunch is Headdress — a heady, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink anthem that could do for Amazing Baby what Kids did for MGMT.

Yet, despite its cleverness, much of Rewild doesn't hang together as well as it might.

The effervescent sense of adventure of the above named songs only serves to highlight the relative paucity of ideas elsewhere.

Burn it: Invisible Place; Headdress

Slow Club - Yeah So? (Moshi Moshi)

This boy-girl duo hail from Sheffield, but their sound is about as far off your Arctic Monkeys and Jarvis Cockers as you can get.

Instead, Charles Watson and Rebecca Taylor do a neat line in retro replication. Rockabilly? Check. Sixties garage? Check. Appalachian hick folk? Check.

As befitting a support act for those tap-dancing Omaha nutters, Tilly and the Wall, Slow Club like to ratchet up the oddball factor. Their shows feature found objects used as percussion, and apparently that's been the case in studio too. The twee factor is compounded by the fact that Rebecca plays an organ they've named ‘Myles'.

The goofiness detracts from the fact that the subject matter is far from joyous. The bulk of the songs are concerned with the detritus of broken relationships. I Was Unconscious, It Was A Dream captures the anguish best: “I let you say ‘I love you' / When I know I'll never say it back”.

Burn it: Giving Up On Love