It's about that time of year when you give up on anything more from this one than Christmas parties, the making of endless lists and three days of drinking wine for breakfast and eating like you've got five stomachs.

But! There's always the imminent approach of next year, and the album-shaped presents it will bring. There's plenty of biggies to look forward to: MIA, Foals, Kate Nash, maybe Klaxons if we're lucky.

But it wouldn't do to overlook the early doors ones, especially not if they're as good as Yeasayer's second album. For the formerly somewhat po-faced, Pitchfork-beloved propagators of gorgeous ambient/world/folk/other/other/other jams have only gone and discovered sex and dancing...

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You know an album’s going to be good when all your writers suddenly email you at once going ‘Oh my god, have you heard this?!’. It happened last year with Wild Beasts and Noah And The Whale, and the first band of 2010 to disappear in a flurry of hastily mistyped missives are former Southend-sceners and Angular Records beaty post-punkers TNP. ‘Hidden’, out January 18 (nice birthday present, guys, thanks!), definitely marks an adventurous sonic step forward from ‘Beat Pyramid’. And when we say 'step', we mean 'stampede'.

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Digging up buried treasure from the depths of our collections. This week – Jamie Crossan basks in the lesser-known melodies and dry wit of the magic piper of love.

Considering the waves of overdue and well-deserved respect that’s lapped on Edwyn Collins’ doorstep of late, it’s remarkable that ‘A Girl Like You’ remains his only solo commercial hit. His elder statesman status and the admiration which his determined recovery from his 2005 brain haemorrhage earned him has obscured the fact that, for many years, his records went pretty much unnoticed bar one radio hit.

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This week - Martin Robinson gets dewy-eyed over a hardcore manifesto of youth power that never quite got the vote

The Nation Of Ulysses
Plays Pretty For Baby
(Dischord, 1992)

“I’m not talking ’bout a Beatles’ song, written 100 years before I was born/They’re all talking ’bout the round and round, but who’s got the real anti-parent culture sound?”

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'Nevermind' has been so over-praised for so long, it's no longer an album, it's a museum piece – literally. It's the only modern recording to be included in America's Library Of Congress, where it nestles alongside Franklin D Roosevelt's Presidential radio broadcasts, Martin Luther King's 'I Have A Dream' speech, and the Baywatch theme tune. OK, maybe not the last one.

Such hushed reverence is appropriate – not because 'Nevermind' is an epochal work of art, but rather because, 18 years after its release, Nirvana's 26million-selling breakthrough album has become a dusty and calcified thing, deadened by cliché, something to be peered at in a display case, or mulled over in a Mojo magazine think-piece, rather than listened to, or danced to. Be honest: when you hear 'Come As You Are' or 'In Bloom' on your iPod, do your veins still surge with adrenaline? Or do you, like me, reach guiltily for the scroll wheel?

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Them Crooked Vultures – the super-group formed by Dave Grohl, Josh Homme and Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones – release their self-titled debut album on November 17. There will be a full, considered review in the issue of NME onsale the week before that, but seeing as we've just had the album on the stereo, here's a snap, first-listen, track-by-track response.

No One Loves Me
Kicks off with an itchy, bluesy riff before settling into a libidinous sex-groove in the tradition of QOTSA's 'Make It Wit Chu' (sample lyric: "She said, I got a beautiful place to put your face – and she was right"). Mutates into a skronking wig-out halfway through.

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