Guillemots – 'Trains to Brazil' (Polydor) Released 11/09/06

After being cruelly pipped to the Mercury Prize by a bunch of surly and uncommunicative teenagers, Guillemots get back to doing what they do best – releasing bizarre, joyful and quite, quite brilliant pop music. It's a measure of how devalued the Mercury has become that they could award the most commercially successful and revivalist album of the year, rather than the most interesting and exciting. Who needs, nay, deserves the publicity more?

'Trains to Brazil' is another corker off Guillemot's rightfully lauded debut Through the Windowpane, as band patriarch Fyfe Dangerfield (and if that isn't one of the best nom-de-plumes in rock, I'll eat my hat with burger sauce) leads his increasingly confused bandmates a merry dance through bells, whistles, Brazilian drums and a chorus of children, with little, or nothing to do with any kind of rail travel in South American. This is a funny, mad and uplifting track, about struggling to get out of bed on cold winter mornings, missing a school crush but imploring "Can't you live and be thankful you're here?" It's remarkable that the band can throw so many ideas at a track and find most of them stick – sometimes on their album this approach doesn't work, but on this, and the beautiful 'Made Up Love Song # 43' are perfect examples of why Guillemots are being hailed as the best new band in Britain.