"Valerie" by Mark Ronson featuring Amy Winehouse

(Capitol)

This song comes from an album that's gotten some of the knee-jerkiest write-ups of the year, from the review-the-bio-not-the-record school of criticism. After all, Ronson is a rich-kid party boy who's a regular in UK gossip sheets, whose It Boy status, as producer for Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse, is about ready for knocking down thanks to Version, featuring covers of recent British artists' songs set to neo-mod-R&B arrangements, sung by a living, breathing Rolodex. What good, the logic goes, can it possibly be?

For the three minutes and 39 seconds "Valerie" is playing, the answer is: as good as possible. It opens by ripping off James Jamerson's bass line from the Supremes' "You Can't Hurry Love," a time-honored pop tradition (see Hall and Oates's "Maneater" and the Jam's "Town Called Malice"). The song is by the heretofore-useless Zutons, and Ronson would get props for ingenuity if convincing Winehouse to sing it were the only thing he'd done in his career. By now Winehouse is so ubiquitous that the flat shock of her voice threatens to be lost forever, but here, she's brighter and more impetuous than on Back to Black, and she can still startle after a dozen listens: her dry, hollow, stuttered "Did you get a good law-y-y-yer," her stung tenderness on the final verse. But she isn't alone: During the final minute, strings take over Ronson's arrangement and suspend it in midair, daring you to look away. The most thrilling track I've heard all year—heard, not surmised based on its pedigree.

"Killing" by the Apples

(Freestyle 7-inch)

In a similar vein, this live, horn-heavy, turntable-abetted funk band from Israel tweaks another modern song into sounding old—in this case, Rage Against the Machine's "Killing in the Name," the title shortened to facilitate even more stump-your-friends fun and games. Of course it's better than the original; it doesn't have Zack de la Rocha's gnat-in-a-matchbox whine, for starters, and the rhythm section swings almost despite the material. I wouldn't be surprised if they swung it for the express purpose of spiting the material. I hope so, anyway. (MP3: dancetracksdigital.com)

"All My Friends" by Franz Ferdinand

(EMI)

The natty Scots new wavers not only cover their friends in LCD Soundsystem for a UK B-side of the latter's single, they grab hold and don't let go. By the time it's over you have to start it again just to figure out where the momentum came from. The result: The song sounds even more like great New Order than it already did.