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You’ll be accustomed to the chart round-up being the jaded mutterings of a pop sadsack by now – sort of like Big crossed with 'Grumpy Old Men', only shitter – but this week the machine seems finally to be cranking into life so we’d better give it a good once over.

Setting our turntables to 45rpm and ignoring the number one (Basshunter, still), personally I’ve got a bit of a hard-on for Rihanna’s Jackson-filching ace ‘Please Don’t Stop The Music’, which is up a whole place to four this week. We’re pleased to announce Destiny’s Child runner-up Kelly Rowland’s new single is pretty swell, too, a convincing slice of avant-garde exercise music with talking-really-fast bits that sound like an aftershock from the now-distant bootyquake that is ‘Crazy In Love’.

Hounslow boy Jay Sean comes good at number eleven, layering his insipid garage warbling over a sluggish hip-hop beat on ‘Ride It’, while Bullet For My Valentine are new entries with their shit metal – shetal, if you will – thrash ‘Scream Aim Fire’ in at 34.

Not that it’s particularly audible on the YouTube clip, but it sounds like Mary J Blige has roped in the bassist from Yeasayer and gone sans fret for her new single ‘Just Fine’, up 19 places to 28 on downloads alone. An agreeably swishy bit of sophisticated r ‘n’ b it is, too. And One Night Only may be looking at the stars at 39 with ‘Just For Tonight’, but really, the gutter’s too good for these numb-noggined tosspots.

Bizarrely, there are signs of life in the album charts this week as well, Lupe Fiasco going in at seven with Lupe Fiasco’s The Cool - seriously, why brand it thus? It’s not Birdseye potato waffles – and Nickelback rising 31 places with For All The Right Reasons, a title that sounds for all the world like the mitigating plea of a delusional rapist.

British Sea Power are down 12 places to 22 with Do You Like Rock Music?, while Eels make themselves known at 26 with Meet The Eels. Cat Power’s patchily-received (but not round these parts) covers album Jukebox does a cracking impersonation of the number 32 spot, in at number 32.

And look out, the indie just don’t stop this week - Lightspeed Champion pops in to say hello at 45 with Falling Off The Lavender Bridge, much like he did the DiS office only the other day. What with his outlandish headgear and little pointy shoes, he was possibly the most finely-tapered gentleman I ever saw.

Finally, Black Mountain’s trad-rock odyssey In The Future surfaces at 72, making a molehill out of a mountain even Alan Titchmarsh’d be loathe to call a nuisance.