Tight, concise and thrillingly sharp

As BBC4’s recent Heavy Metal Britannia  suggested, mainstream culture as a whole is moving wholesale towards an acceptance – if not a fundamental understanding – of all things beefy and loud.

BBC Two will be showing the Blur documentary, No Distance Left To Run later this week. It'll screen on Sunday March 14 at 22.50, but will also be available on iPlayer for around a week.

Faithless are back in their full live glory after a winter touring with their stripped down, intimate sets as Faithless Sound System. Catch them now at these fan club shows, ahead of their major festival appearances this summer for a Faithless experience like never before - legendary anthems from the past and brand new tracks from the forthcoming album 'The Dance'.

This could well be one of the most disappointing albums of 2010

Sympathy is due, in some measure, to The Automatic. A spunky first album with a single that became inescapable in 2006 – Not Accepted Anywhere  and Monster, respectively – was followed by a realisation of their promise to get ‘harder’ on second album This Is a Fix – an underrated sophomore effort which received little promotion compared to its predecessor.

A triumphant LP

Before hitting play on The Optimist, there's a fear that it's going to be a less timely rehearsal of New Young Pony Club's 2007 debut. And while the fever of that LP came from its direct rip of the early 80s, its aloof riot-starting propensities and conscious eclecticism became listless by the third playback.

WIN EXCLUSIVE TICKETS TO SEE THE ENEMY PLAY AT THE 2010 FIFA WORLD CUP TROPHY TOUR THIS THURSDAY

Coca-Cola is mixing football and music this March by teaming up with the award winning rock band The Enemy to kick off its FIFA World Cup™ celebrations as it brings its FIFA World CupTM Trophy Tour to London.

Lives up both to its rebellious, riotous ambition and its rich musical heritage

Bruce Springsteen has enjoyed something of a renaissance recently. Not just in terms of his own career, which has once again flourished since 2002’s The Rising, but through a number of bands who are carrying the torch he first lit on E Street all those years ago. From The Killers to Arcade Fire, The Hold Steady to The Gaslight Anthem, this recent surge of Boss-inspired sounds has taken various forms, but nobody has approached it with quite the iconoclastic zeal of Titus Andronicus.

A powerful statement

Although Mechanize is Fear Factory’s third studio album since they officially disbanded in 2002, it’s crucially different from its immediate predecessors. Both Archetype (2004) and Transgression (2005) were controversially written and recorded without founding guitarist Dino Cazares, the main victim of 2002’s acrimonious split. The reconstituted Fear Factory may have featured three-quarters of the classic line-up, but without Cazares, they were fatally flawed. With Cazares back, however, the band are back on track, as Mechanize forcefully demonstrates.

The Magic Numbers are playing one more London show on 22nd of April at The Pigalle, Piccadilly, W1.

They’ll be playing a lot of songs from the new album (as well as your favourites).