Every month or so, Jimmy Possession -- proprietor of the UK-based zine Robots and Electronic Brains -- brings us up to date on the music that's found its way through his mail slot. And you get to read it. You lucky people.

The Duds. You've got to love a band with this little ambition. You've got to love a label whose logo is a pair of headphones with ears where the cans should be. You've got to love whoever thought of the title and you've got to love anyone who can write lyrics like "What the blazes is happening to me?/Why did you have to go and wake me from my coma / Only to nuke me with your putrid aroma?" and "You took a scalpel to my perineum / Then introduced me to your best friend, Liam." And I do love them, and I love these four tracks.

(We Are) Horrid Little Men is as close to high self-esteem as The Duds get. It's a drum machine tick and a couple of Casio preset melodies wonked together badly but perfectly under a vocal that veers between Madcap Laughs and laughably mad. The Likes of You sounds like something Half Man Half Biscuit never got quite depressed enough to write. And even if they had, their version would never have switchbacked between shambolic and gilt-edged beauty the way this does. Tracts from the Ontodungeon is the gem in the ointment, a creaking folky rumble lathering a sampled loop in spook. Vermiform Convergence rounds things off splendidly with a hook discarded by Visage spliced into 33rpm techno, weirdy chanting and the sound of a sink emptying. It sounds like the chassis for an Art of Noise masterpiece. All this for £5 (chqs to Eeriephone) from PO Box 208, Exeter, EX4 7WD. Go on, make them feel better about themselves. Even their email address has got it in for them. The Duds don't suck.
E-Mail: thedudsuk@yahoo.co.uk

Piggybacking on the tune to Nice One Cyril as played by a barnful of hoe-down hicks high on Granpa's Special 'Shine, Whiskey And Rye is a sharp pitchfork that pokes you in the ear a couple of times. Listen, it seems to be saying, as it square dances dangerously across in front of your face, this is not a run-of-the-mill record. No Mr Fork, you reply, and put down your copy of Cosmopolitan, thinking that you'll be able to return to its glossy feature on pubestyles as soon as We Are The Boggs We Are turns out to be just another run-of-the-mill record with a superior opening cut. You are wrong. And your pubes still look like Scruffy McGuffy's worst hair-day ever.

John and Alan Lomax famously toured the United States in the early 20th century, collecting the songs of the people they found on their travels. Blues, country, folk, bluegrass, hillbilly and points outside and in between were inscribed on wax cylinder for posterity. For this we should be thankful. The Boggs are. They've absorbed it, obsessed on it, luxuriated in it, loved it and learned it. And now they're letting it all back out in this authentic set of banjo plucking, mouth-organ blowing, geetar picking, fiddle fiddling and heartfelt singing at times with the in-yer-face intensity and slurred delivery of the Pogues at their most manic, at other times with the softest, most gentle intimacy of Woody Guthrie lit by candlelight.
Web: www.arenarockrecordingco.com

A CDR containing two tracks of collaboration between Catchpenny's finest, DJ Komikon and Y Dref, in advance of a full release later in the year. Both ride a basic loop (a funky break in the case of The Duckworth-Lewis Method, a funky foursome for Cawslyd) for a short duration, both drop vocal samples in Welsh and English, both are basic without being lo-fi, both could fill a dancefloor for those with a short attention span, and both sound like whoever is behind the pseudonyms knows what they're doing.
PO Box 88, Mold, CH7 4ZQ, Wales
E-Mail: catchpenny@lycos.com

Alternately far out and far in, Everything After the Bomb is Sci-Fi kicks Asimov both ways over. Far out: rocking out, balls out, kick out the jams, scorching, megalithic guitar wendings that, as the press release almost tiredly points out, will generate "comparisons to Mogwai." But still, far out. Far in: rocking in, inside your head, intense, keep the jams in, motherfuckers, liberating abstract noise that bends and binds and winds up and builds up and eventually gets to where it needed to get to. Then stops. Far in.
PO Box 81941, Pittsburgh, PA 15217, USA.
E-Mail: audio@cenotaph.com
Web: www.cenotaph.org

Years after I'm dead, when some future musical obsessionist tries to ask if what I wrote about Everett True's arse tattoo was made up, Robot Drama is the music I want played at the séance. Never as warped as someone like Marianne Nowottny, Rebecca Simpson still shares the same sense of otherness and wrings every last drop of it out of these songs. They are spooky and spartan, and Rebecca is far, far away from her band (guitar/bass/piano/drums) in both voice and spirit. These songs give me the creeps the same way Palace can.
45 Fennings Street, Toronto, Ontario, M6J 3B9, Canada
E-Mail: info@dievenom.com
Web: www.dievenom.com

We liked Eltro's Velodrome album from last year and we like this reissue of their debut from 1998 too. Seven long, slow, lengths of snarling irritable guitar, Information Changer pulses and throbs for 50 minutes the way Six By Seven might if Kim Deal joined.
1412 10th Street, Berkeley, CA 94710, USA
Web: www.eltro.net

I'm taking the Ps: "Pete's punk pop/personal politics." It's a distillation of every description of Milky Wimpshake I've ever read. Worse, it's true. Fortunately, there's depth and complexity to back up the clichéd ease of the canned alliterative review. Pete (Dale) ran Slampt records, a label whose integrity cannot be doubted and whose back catalogue is a testament to the numerous permutations a 4-track, a guitar and spirit can wring out of punk over consecutive Saturday afternoons in the North East. Pete's lyrics are printed on the sleeve of Lovers Not Fighters. They pull off the clever trick of being right without being self-righteous, passing on the message without ever jarring and never rhyming "establishment" and "government" (although there is a terrible pun on Saussure.) Simple. And complicated.
PO Box 6498, Leicester, LE2 1WU
Web: www.fortunapop.com

Formerly Solar Plexus, and formerly much lauded around these parts, Saint Joan's new identity brings with it a new seven inch and further plaudits. The demo we had was old and badly recorded, but we still loved the folking thing. The Ice House stretches out and glosses up but still winds itself around Ellen McGee's vocal and a sinuous flute line. In the instrumental breaks you get the feeling that the rest of the band are creeping towards the Slint line, but can't quite bring themselves to cross it. Lovely.
Web: www.saintjoan.co.uk

Here's a warning for Younger Readers: memory gets fuzzy with age. You won't believe me of course, because you're cleverer than me, and invincible. But it's true. You will also develop a paunch/your tits will begin to sag (or, worse, both) and you will start to look forward to Animal Hospital and smile at babies while out shopping. Take my advice: keep a diary, don't look in any mirror after the age of 27, kill your television and order all your groceries from tesco.com. The most important of these is the first. If I'd known then what I know now, I'd be able to tell you for sure whether I saw The Telescopes first time around supporting Loop. I'm almost certain I did, but the fuzz just keeps building up.

Talking of fuzz, the Telescope experience back then would be very different to The Telescopes today. Back then it was a Mary Chain-inspired scratchety racket blurring into swirling psychedelia. Because I didn't keep that diary I've just dug out Indie Top Ten (volume 5) for the first time in, let's see, 12 years. The Telescopes' Precious Little is sandwiched between Velouria by The Pixies and Spiritualised's version of Anyway You Want Me. And that's about right, I guess, for a band that signed to Creation around the same time as Ride. So, that was then. Fast-forward and we're now riding the Third Wave. After a nine-year hiatus, two of the original ‘Scopes (Stephen Lawrie and Jo Doran) have stitched together a new album that doesn't feature a single guitar according to the credits. In its place has come space ­ the electronic space to experiment and the interstellar space to dream. Bathed in a digital glow, Third Wave is a luxurious merger of Krauty groove and dreamsong melody, of man and machine, of slow psychedelia and buzzing energy. Pick of the twelve tracks is Tesla Death Ray which samples Space Invaders for a bass line, adds vocoderised vocals and turns out like Radioactivity halfway to the moon.
c/o Antenna Records, PO Box 6083,Burton On Trent, DE14 2ZX
Web: www.doubleagentreords.com