Just one listen to Paolo Nutini’s magnificent third long-player Caustic Love reveals exactly why it was worth the wait. It’s been five years since the towering success of its 2009 predecessor, Sunny Side Up, which like the 27-year-old Paisley-born singer’s 2006 debut These Days, sold a staggering 1.5 million copies in the UK alone. Described by Q magazine as “a truly excellent modern soul album”, it’s a record that acknowledges the classic music of the past while fixing its eyes firmly on the future. There may be echoes of some of soul music’s greats within the grooves of Caustic Love – Otis Redding, Curtis Mayfield, Bill Withers, among others – but taken as a whole it’s a masterful creation which proves Paolo to be very much his own man.

The video for “I Don’t Want to Change You,”  is now available for fans to watch. ‘I Don’t Want To Change You’ is he lead single off Damien Rice’s long awaited new album My Favourite Faded Fantasy. The video was directed by Icelandic filmmaking duo Arni & Kinski and shot in Iceland, where much of the album was recorded. The song also recently debuted on Irish radio and he recently performed it on Later..with Jools Holland.

What does deep house, the work of Stockhausen, a self-programmed snake and a frozen Lily Cole have in common? No, it’s not the contents of a lost episode of Skins. Nor is it the XX’s Christmas list. It is, rather, just a few of the details that make up Clean Bandit, a new four-piece that in their playfulness and willingness to trample over musical boundaries offer a refreshing new direction for dance music in 2013.