Monday 2 July 2007

Electric Pop Group at The Luminaire 30th June 2007

How to melt a Kitten’s heart on Another Rainy Saturday:

  • Line up four Swedish indie-pop boys-with-guitars across the stage (you can always tell they’re Swedish, they have this certain je ne sais quoi that Swedish indie-pop boys have about them that makes you recognise them as such).
  • Make sure those guitars shimmer with hints of the Jesus and Mary Chain at their most melodic.
  • Get them to play a succession of songs that are sheer sound-of-1986 chiming pop wonderment.

Why has nobody informed me about The Electric Pop Group before? I know their name has cropped up here and there, but nobody emphasised their fabness. I just assumed they were another bunch of Scandos in thrall to the much misinterpreted ‘C86’ sound (let’s not even go there, okay?), and there are only so many of them a girl can investigate.

The band name is so obvious, it’s perfect – clean, elegant, effective design; how very Swedish. The Electric Pop Group play their guitars to an iPod backing track and they all look exceedingly discombobulated by the fact that they’re on stage, but we’ll let them off ‘cos their songs are great. There goes ‘Popgirly’, with its jangly JAMC ‘Happy Place’ chords, the song around which the band was formed four years ago. It's sugary, chiming, nothing-new-under the-sunshine pop and I love it.

When we were 17, at our stripy tee-shirted, anorak-wearing, ice-cream eating indie-est we were self-diagnosed ‘pop-kids’, aiming to be like The Brilliant Corners’ ‘Emily’ who ‘made a skirt from a curtain, plays the tambourine’. If it had occurred to us though, we definitely would have taken on the mantle of ‘popgirlies’ and worn the name with dippy pride, alongside our Soup Dragons badges. So hurrah for the Electric Pop Group and their time-travelling shmindie-pop. Exult in the sheer fringe-shaking, knock-kneed spangly jangle of their tunes.
www.myspace.com/theelectricpopgroup

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