I WAS determined this week, to plough through the detritis until I found something - anything - I liked.

After all, it's too easy, this reviewing endless rubbish lark, slating the dross as it pumps into your earholes through tiny wee plugs in your waning and waxy orifices.

And yes, somewhere around the fifth CD single I was indeed ready to run from the room.

But lo, what light from yonder window breaks?

It is the east, and Newton Faulkner is the sun. Or rather his album, Hand Built By Robots, is.

A properly talented guitarist, who has gathered a wave of fans from his MySpace site - www.myspace.com/newtonfaulkner - and rightly so.

It's the only shiny disk in the pile that didn't make me feel murderous.

They give off so much promise, these little circles of silvery possibility. You can feel the excitement of the artist for whom it is their first foray into the music business.

For Newton, his star is already in the ascendant, with Dream Catch Me getting great airtime all over the place.

But it is his dexterity with his guitar on the other tracks on this debut album that sets him apart from the dreadfulness of the electronic knitting that populates the rest of the pile littering my desk.

Newton, so the press release goes, was taught guitar by the legendary Eric Roche and was asked by the great Jimmy Page to play at his birthday party.

It's not just in the way he takes total charge of his instrument, but in the clever lyrics - the words of a deep thinker, a philosopher.

"People should smile more. I'm not saying there's nothing to cry for. You've got everything laid out for you. Just close your eyes. Take a deep breath. And start another war."

It reminds me of another time altogether, when lyrics meant something instead of being just a handy filler in the space between the warbling.

So smile more - buy Hand Built By Robots and take your foot off the accelerator.

It is with a heavy heart, then, that I turn to the rest of that pile I keep blathering about, trying to avoid the inevitable drubbing I fear it must get.

Y'see, it's not something I really like doing. I'd love to hear music I've never heard before, that makes my hair stand on end.

Remember being a teenager? When almost every week you'd hear some piece of music that would make you swoon with how utterly brilliant it was?

Being all squeaky new as a human being and hearing a Beatles track you hadn't heard before and it being bloody brilliant.

Or being introduced to Pink Floyd. Joni, Janis, Smokey. What a revelation it all was.

My teenage years were full of these revelations.

I spent years wearing a groove in countless records that were, and remain to this day, extraordinary pieces of work.

But in the discos Yazz, UB40 and Haircut 100 reigned supreme. UB40 were a particular grain of salt in the wound, as I recall, with their synthetic white man reggae - smeggae, I like to call it - jarring nastily against the stunning Bob Marley classics I had just started to listen to.

Well, pop-pickers, Ali Campbell is back. I'm not sure if he ever went away, but he certainly didn't impinge on my thoughts until I picked up Running Free - an album stuffed with celebrity accompaniment.

I saw the names - Katie Melua, Smokey Robinson, Mick Hucknall, Beverley Knight, Lemar... and I wondered, briefly, whether anything good could come of this. Surely anything with Smokey and Katie couldn't be all bad?

Yes, yes it is.

It's in the electric drums, the nasty tss tss tss, the nasal-ness of the vocals. It brings Red Red Wine flooding back, all over your cream shagpile. Track after track, you're sitting there hoping for some respite from the tinny white noise of UB40-ness.

But it doesn't come.

And the guest artists don't help. They serve as a distraction, in that you stick it in your CD drive wondering what could possibly possess these people to record smeggae tracks.

What indeed? Answers on a postcard.

Finally, I give you the newest Swedish sensation.

If you're like me, you listen to anything Swedish in the hope that Abba will be reborn, that the cool Scandinavians have plucked another winner from the hat.

According to their PR, Lucky Twice are two young girls causing a storm around Europe.

Of protest, perhaps?

Maybe it's a rainstorm? It certainly made me want to stay indoors.

Also - and this shows you must never take someone's publicity seriously - their single Lucky is a double platinum award winner.

Voted by who? Five-year-olds on crack?

It's a hideous mixture of Aqua's Barbie Girl and the Cheeky Girls' Touch My Bum.

It's masquerading as cheerful, candyfloss pop, but it is in fact evil and makes you feel bad.

It's loft insulation painted pink on a stick of semtex.

It's Mary Poppins with a full beard.

It's bound to be HUGE.