A brace of new entries right at the top of this week’s chart help to disguise the fact that it’s otherwise pretty much moribund – there are three new entries total, and only a couple of climbers of any significance.

The new number 1 is “Louder” by DJ Fresh featuring Sian Evans, which is currently being used in a Lucozade advert.  For the benefit of overseas readers, Lucozade is an energy drink.  That means it’s full of sugar but does a lot of branding work to associate itself with sports.

The original advert is 90 seconds long to start with; that video is basically a double-length edit with the branding removed.  (And yes, it was shot primarily as an advert.  This is the sort of thing that must give Ofcom headaches about product placement on the music channels.)  If you can put the association with Lucozade out of your head, it’s pretty good; if you can’t, it’s an enormous advert.

DJ Fresh (Daniel Stein) is a member of the drum and bass group Bad Company, and had a number 24 hit last year with “Gold Dust” – the one with the video that seems to be trying to pass it off as an American record.  Actually, that was a decent track too.  Sian Evans was the lead singer of Kosheen, who had four hits in 2001-3 – the biggest was “Hide U” in September 2001.  I haven’t heard it in years, but it holds up well.

This week’s other big new entry is “How We Roll” by Loick Essien featuring Tanya Lacey.  Essien is a Londoner, but his parents are Nigerian and Ghanaian.  Somehow, he didn’t quite make it in among the first wave of UK pop/urban crossover acts.  His only previous hit, “Stuttering”, stalled at 36, and that was with N-Dubz as guest stars.  “How We Roll” is, well, a UK pop/urban crossover single of 2011, but it’s an above average one.

This is the lead single from his second album, and I see the video has been on YouTube for two months, so they’ve clearly been hyping it up some way in advance of release.  That said, it’s still in the top 5 on the midweeks, so it’s not a one-week wonder.  As for Tanya Lacey… frankly, I’ve no idea who she is.

And that’s about as much activity as we get this week.  “Set Fire To The Rain” by Adele is still climbing at number 12; “Next To You” by Chris Brown & Justin Bieber dutifully leaps from 39 to 24 in its second week; and the only other new entry is “The Mack” by Mann featuring Snoop Dogg & Iyaz at 28, which is a semi-cover of Mark Morrison’s 1997 hit “Return of the Mack” – which in turn was one of the many, many songs to sample 1981’s “Genius of Love” by Tom Tom Club.