Help Stamp Out Loneliness - Help Stamp Out Loneliness (WIAIWYA / Papillons Noir)

Woo! A real whizz of excitement when I open up the jiffy bag and discover I’ve been sent the debut by Help Stamp Out Loneliness. Gig ubiquitous a couple of years ago, the band have been off the radar for a bit, but their songs stayed in my head the whole time, infectious tunes flashing out of my memory at random moments, sparkling bright, making me smile. It’s great to see them back, especially with this beautifully honed album.

You know the way you’re always hoping a record will hit pop highs? When you’re waiting for that point when the music flicks that switch inside you that transforms the world… and then often it never quite works? This record flicks that switch and hits those highs. Soaring, sky-high, above the clouds just laughing down at it raining kind of pop highs. It’s a brilliant Spring into Summer record - big, optimistic sounds, shining guitars, swooning synths, shivery keyboards and singer D. Lucille’s swooping Nico voice dipping and swerving, dragging your heart in its slipstream.

Soaring opener ‘Cottonopolis + Promises’ has echoes of Blondies’ ‘Dreaming’, a good touchstone for the band’s sound, not because they’re a female fronted band (duh! there are also two keyboarding women in the band, thanks) but because this is effortless, ageless pop music.

‘Record Shop’ is a ready-made classic, you can’t help but stop and let yourself get magicked away in its big pop sound, imagining the future you rushing to the dance floor with a whoop as the first chords kick in.

Help Stamp Out Loneliness are a cut above yer average guitars-bit-of-keyboards-for variety schmindie band, there’s an ambitious sheen about the songs. ‘Cellophane’ has a bumpy-funk rhythm, its serpentine tune wrapped in huskily piping fairground organ. ‘S-W-I-M’ gleams and shimmers and winks from a darkened corner where it’s flirting with The Cure. ‘Palma Violence’ menaces in the sleekest, most twinkly way and ‘My Window’ goes all wide-screen with sandpapery guitar wibbling and sighing backing vocals.

The twelve songs here whirl you along with a rush and a push of powerful pop momentum, like taking a dozen rollercoaster rides one after the other. Which isn’t to say there’s no breathing space here, the music is expansive and luxurious. It’s enthusiastic and joyful. I hope that’s how the band feel about the record because that’s what comes across and that’s how it makes me feel.

P.S. 'Record Shop' is being released as a free download to celebrate Record Shop Day on April 16th. Support your local record shop innit? Links below:

www.myspace.com/helpstampoutloneliness

www.wiaiwya.com

www.brokenheartfoundation.org.uk/papillonsnoirs

In Debt - Jonny Cola & The A-Grades (Corporate Records)

Jonny Cola & The A-Grades are bastards. Their idea of quirky promotional material is a letter with FINAL NOTICE typed large across the top – so at first glance your heart leaps into your mouth, argh! what? Oh ha ha, the album is called ‘In Debt’.

And your hammering heart isn’t allowed a moment’s respite ‘cos ‘In Debt’ is stuffed with sparkling, strutting glam-Brit pop. Imagine that Britpop hadn’t become a sorry, degraded thing. That the initial shine and shiver had led to euphoric epiphanies and perfectly puckered pop kisses in a starburst universe where guitars scrawled and caterwauled like alleycats. That kind of thing.

Alex’s rather fine voice - a little clipped and Bowie-ish here, glammily sneering there - is shown off to full swooning advantage on slow-burn anthemic opener, ‘Fireworks / Gunshots’, an urban torch song that bursts into beautiful bombast, guitars squiggling all over, setting the tone for this album of rocked-up grubby glam.

A double-handed attack from A-Grade guitar heroes Mauro Venegas and Jez Leather powers the songs along, guitars slashing ‘n’ sneering, hurtling between full-on widdly skree bits, skydiving shimmers and strutting, fuzzed up, headstocks-akimbo riffing.

The glorious ‘Postcode Wars’ speaks of floaty shirts, fly-away scarves and dubiously dyed hair and is a teensy bit disco. Get the louche bass in the chorus, oh yes! ‘Greenhouse’ is deliciously hips-out-of-joint funky. ‘Offline’ is a fist in your face squall of feedback and ferocity, and the darkly luxuriant ‘Hideaway 37’ shivers with strategically placed glitter.

But the elation is cast with shadows, even as the chorus of ‘Marlborough Road’ soars skyward, pulling your heart along in its vapour stream, Alex is singing, “I fell apart on Marlborough Road”. And is that a slightly barbed remark I detect in stompy, snarly, snarky single ‘The Party’s Over’? “We might as well move to Luxembourg, though not for the sake of your bank account”.

For all the pose-striking and pop heroics, ‘In Debt’ has a ferocity of intent, an underlying defiant anger. It’s an album that delivers viciously glamorous battle songs for fighting back against the gloom. A useful arsenal in these dark times.

www.jonnycolaandtheagrades.net

www.myspace.com/jonnycolaandtheagrades

Dansette Dansette – Tender Trap (Fortuna Pop!)

Ten years (nearly) and three albums in, it feels like Tender Trap are riding a creative high. Flanked by Elizabeth Morris and Katrina Dixon, Amelia Fletcher has created a modern indiepop girl group. This is not to belittle the rumbling bass and snaggly guitar contributed by long-term Tender Trap blokes Rob and John, but the ladies’ harmonies are truly a driving force on this record, bursting from the songs and layering them with a heart flipping loveliness that transforms the band’s music into something really special.

‘Dansette Dansette’ is Tender Trap’s homage to and update on the sixties girl group sound. The title track name-checks Sandy Shaw, Leslie Gore and The Supremes, the album is strewn with ‘Be My Baby’ drumbeats, sha la las, ba ba bas, big echoey guitars, all the ingredients that make up the kind of pop hit that’s sung in matching dresses and beehives with co-ordinated hand jiving. Only not, because hurrah! feminism has happened, so we can still thrill to sugar-sweet pop but not have to cringe because ‘girls’ can now write the songs and, you know, do tricky man stuff like play drums and guitars.

These are big catchy pop songs played with style and wit. Amelia’s silvery voice is sometimes sweet, sometimes rueful, sometimes annoyed (“We’re ready to get mean”). The guitars fuzz and grumble rather dirtily under the rollercoasting, trip-trap tumbling vocals, so one minute you’re going all shivery to the melodies, the next you catch a fizz of feedback and go ‘Yeah!’

The ba ba bas on the swooning ‘Suddenly’ are er, Heavenly, whilst the guitars crunch and reverberate in a JAMC kinda way. The Jesus And Mary Chain get a shout out (literally) on the wry ‘Do You Want A Boyfriend’, an entertaining gallop that manages to poke fun at indie boys AND inspect the notion of girl-pop en route.

The fabulous ‘Girls With Guns’ smashes dipping and diving three way harmonies up against knee trembling twangling Duane Eddy guitar to exhilarating effect. The urgent ‘2 To The N’, an energetic slice of catchiness pummelled along by some gleeful stand up drumming from Katrina, sees Amelia toying with some elementary maths –as is her want as an economics genius (see also previous album ‘6 Billion People’).

It’s not all hurtling one-two-three-four fuzzpop though, there’s room for the odd indiepop epic here; the gliding ‘Grand National’ and album closer ‘Capital L’ which manages to gather up all the elements that have gone before and build them into a heart-thumping, heart-cracking wonder that means you than have to go back to the beginning and play the whole record again.

www.fortunapop.com

Indietracks – Indiepop Compilation 2010

Ooh! Only a couple of weeks until we are once again plunged into Indietracks’ pop art world of waving from steam train windows, doing odd crafts, swigging beer in a retired carriage, lounging on the grass, and seeing fistfuls of thrilling bands. This year the good folks at Indietracks have surpassed themselves with the line-up as this 44 track (yeah, count ‘em why don’t you?) compilation amply demonstrates.

Here you will find current fizz pop darlings in the shape of The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, Love Is All, Allo Darlin’ and Standard Fare; olden tymes heroes The Pooh Sticks, The Orchids (they done a special new song here!), Secret Shine and The Cannanes. Or you can rootle out new sweet-hearts: The Felt Tips’ charming chiming; Internet Forever’s thumping sparklefest; The Blanche Hudson Weekend’s Blondie/Shop Assistants kiss-up in an echo-chamber.

CD1 ends with an invigorating shoutalong with Shrag on ‘Ghosts Before Breakfast’ which gets your blood pumping ready for CD2, a killer pop comp that takes in the clattery cape-pop of Veronica Falls, This Many Boyfriends’ jumpalong jittering, reverb-fabulous twanglin’ from The Specific Heats and the heart-swooning delicacy of The Middle Ones. See, indiepop can encompass a wide range of musics, The Millipedes’ wiggy Nuggets garage; a spot of breezy ukulele and trumpet wist-pop from Jam On Bread; The Just Joans’ drolly doleful smut-folk (exclusive track hereon!); gauzy bossa nova from Cineplexx; Betty And The Werewolves’ lollipop girlie-punk; La La Love You’s warp-speed hyper-pop. Not to mention the tremendous leap from the sublime to the ridiculous that is made between White Town’s Barretty ‘I Don’t Want To Fall In Love Again’ and M.J Hibbett and The Validator’s ‘We Are The Giant Robots’. It’s comforting to think that if giant robots do arrive to enslave the human race they’ll do it whilst singing this jaunty number.

There’s no excuse for not getting this record really. It’s great for building up yr festival anticipation. Play it whilst combing your wardrobe for perfect Indietracks outfits (e.g. button badges, excellently patterned frocks, way obscure tee-shirts, little corduroy caps, any kind of vaguely mod threads), or as a Derbyshire-bound road-trip soundtrack. If for some reason (what?) you’re not going to Indietracks, listen to this comp and have yr own in-house festival (stock up on fine ales, veg curry, felt badges and er, old locomotives). Finally, you can listen along whilst reliving your pop sozzled memories, looking at everyone’s Indietracks photos on Flickr and reading their hyper-charged reminiscences on the Anorak Forum. Singing on the platform, swooning in the church, dancing like a loon in front of the main stage…this’ll get your spirits soaring once the whole shebang is (sob!) over.

www.makedoandmendrecords.co.uk

Camera & Tremor - The Tamborines (Beat-Mo Records)

It’s very late. Or maybe really early. You find yourself on a narrow sidestreet you’ve never really paid much attention to before. Sound throbs from an open doorway and you step closer to investigate. There’s a shabby corridor painted deep red, steep steps that lead you into a dimly lit basement room. It’s loud in here. Very loud. The noise is disorientating and you put out a hand to balance yourself. Turns out you’re clutching the edge of the bar, so you order yourself a drink. It’s vodka or nothing here. A pure, clean rush. It burns satisfyingly on your lips as you flick your eyes across the crowd. Everyone’s dressed entirely in black. Some of them wear sunglasses and move languidly through the noise as if it’s physically restraining them. Some shake their heavy fringes in time to the ricochet drumbeats.

A man’s voice singing, “I trip inside your wired mind”. There’s a band onstage. Shaky Super 8 film flickers across the back wall and camouflages the players. You see an eye here, a hand there, a pointy boot, a perfect bowlcut. Three people are making that colossal sound. Guitar and keyboard growl and throb, whine and shimmer whilst the drummer hammers it all home. It’s heavy and it makes you want to move. To nod your head and stamp your feet. You move closer to the stage and let the music judder through you, sound-waves pulsing the air around your face.

Then you’re taken by surprise. A tambourine shaken HARD splits the dissonance. There’s sweetness amongst the snarl. The fuzz ‘n’ distortion crowd are here because they like a hit of POP with their raw power. A taste of honey with their bouquet of barbed wire kisses. Here are tunes that dip and glide and make you feel secretly serene. You realise that these songs are going to be indelibly inked into your mind from now on. There’ll always be a swooping melody or a keyboard line tumbling over and over to rush you along through the tumult. The noise is building again, pedals are stomped, strings are scratched, four notes on the keyboard that won’t take no for an answer. Ultra-white strobe lights shiver on and off, on and off, on and off, slicing up the room into disconnected slivers off space and time…

You wake on Sunday Morning. In your head there’s a honey bee buzz. Unfurling your clenched fingers you find you’re clutching a scrap of paper. Written in tiny letters, all lower-case, it says, ‘camera & tremor’.

www.thetamborines.com

Katapult – Wednesday Club (Odd Box Records)

Some words about Wednesday Club: joyful, absurd, spirit raising on a gloomy day, abundantly melodic, super eclectic. ‘Katapult’, the product of three different songwriters, is 57 varieties of pick ‘n’ mix musical fun, slipping and sliding all over the pop shop for your delectation and delight. Fifteen songs in half an hour that offer variously: a soupcon of Jonathan Richman here, a dash of The McTells there, the vague ghosts of a whole hotch-potch of alty/indiepop stuff from 1986/1996/2006/whenever floating in and out of your ears and the odd psych-y twist.

Wednesday Club are apparently three fifths of The Medusa Snare (with about nought percent of the MS sound) and sing couplets like: “You like Belle And Sebastian / Your sister is a thespian” (‘Marks And Lines’) whilst delivering a variety-pack of pop straight to the breakfast bowl of your heart.

Guitars jangle and pianos plink, drums rattle and ‘Steven’s House’ is a sweet singalong pop smash! ‘Wave At Planes’ is all lilting and wistful. The opening of ‘European Veins’ is not dissimilar to The Darling Buds’ ‘Spin’ and then it continues in a splendidly fuzzy, rattley and yes, JAMC kind of way (maybe 'cos of those Manhattan Love Suicide connections?) Woo! ‘Huevos’ starts off a bit Barretty then has a personality change and comes over all aggressive and shouty. Flip!

‘De Lomelanicon’ has the exact correct measurements of sway-along melancholy and longing and contrasts perfectly with album closer, the fuzzy, fizzy, cuckoo clockwork of ‘Citalogasm’ which will have you singing along oh so sweetly with the choir, “Fuck the world. Fuck the whole wide world”. Beautiful.

And can I just point out the song title ‘Schrodinger’s Catflap’. Nice work.

oddboxrecords.com

Shake Your Bones - The Millipedes (Oddbox Records)

‘Shake Your Bones’ sets its cards on the table from the off, opening with the galumphing, dumb-cluck garage of ‘Make Something Happen’. If you want sophisticated or experimental, you’re outta luck chum. If you want rip-snortingly gleeful frugadelic beat tunes, then step right up.

The Millipedes play monster raving groovy mondo mongo trashcan rock ‘n’ roll complete with Girls In The Garage vocals courtesy of the splendidly-named Dolly Grip (who Sheffield pop lovers may know better as Reenie). Their album is excellent beat-fuelled fun.

‘Married To The Wolfman’ is riddled with “Awhooo’ howls and creepy crawly organ. ‘Shake Your Bones’ will get you doing just that - handclappin’, twistin’ and shoutin’, quiff a quiver. ‘Hey Boy’ sounds like The Temptations' ‘Get Ready’ got speeded up and fuck-witted. ‘Ooh-Wee’ thunders along on a rumbling organ riff, sounding dense in both senses of the word. Then just to prove it’s not all fast, furious and boggle-eyed there’s ‘Never Wanted To Go’. A sweetly sultry swingin’ sway-along slow one.

Oddbox Records, living up to the name, are releasing this album as a series of seven inch E.P.s. Collect all three as a box set that comes with artwork by Oliver Allchin. A CD of all the seven inch songs comes with an additional track, a crazed bumblebee fuzz cover of The Eyes’ ‘You’re Too Much’. How could you resist? Get wrigglin’ to The Millipedes.

www.oddboxrecords.com
www.myspace.com/themillipedes

Say Yes! - The Hi-Life Companion (Plastilina Records)

“Just say yes…” sing The Hi-Life Companion, sounding sinister and cult-ish and tempting, “Forget the rest…”

This is a spanking good pop record and the perfect accompaniment to a sunny Saturday morning train ride, an interesting collection of songs that feels like a lot of love and care has gone into its creation. The Hi-Life Companion are no one-trick ponies, cantering from the pastoral to the urban, from swooning to crunching, soothing to (a little bit) menacing. And always with plenty of tunes. ‘Say Yes!’ is a picnic basket packed with good things. Oh so many good things. Sweeping, spangling, crammed with sounds: twangy, jangly fizzy guitars, spingly glockenspiel (maybe even more than one at once!), violins and trumpets, ha ha harmonies – a cornucopia that spills out when you lift the lid. Yes, I do really like it, thanks.

Album opener ‘The Hi-Life Theme’ (always good to have a band theme tune, eh?) shows the band’s folkier side, all strummy and wistful – an English countryside summer, high skies and fields stretching forever (I may be influenced by the view from the train window here). A bit reminiscent of The Garden City Project.

‘Times Table’ is a top tune straight off the block, harmonies and handclaps and twinkly chimes, before ooh! The band break out the brass for ‘Night Comes Down’. ‘One Man Town’ eschews the summery fun. It’s an adrenalized whirr that buzzes along on big guitars. Motorik-licious!

Other sounds you’ll hear here: sleepy-eyed slide guitar; spooky Barretty psychedelia that swishes oceanically; fuzzy, urgent ‘Sympathy For The Devil’ “Ooh, oohs”; snarly piano spanking. A song called ‘The Girl In The Gorilla Suit’.

The album ends with The Hi-Life Companion’s piece de resistance, ‘In Your Heart, A Cathedral’, filmic and expansive (eight minutes!), slowly spiralling sky-high around a central riff, carried by heart-tugging brass. A gorgeous contemplative close.

thehilifecompanion.co.uk

Indietracks : An Indiepop Compilation (Make Do And Mend)

Indietracks! It’s nearly upon us again. Peer down the line and you can just make out a curl of steam in the distance, woohoo!

If you’re going to the festival, this album is an excellent way of getting yerself in the mood. If you’re not going, then it’s a fine primer for what’s going on over the hills and far away from the mainstream in the land of INDIEPOP: be it jangly, spangly, fuzzy, buzzy, spikey, swoonsome or any other kind of marvellous that the term can encompass.

Friends kick things off with the suitably titled ‘You’ll Never See That Summertime Again’, a perfect piece of sparkling summertime pop that is sort of The Bodines if they’d been submerged in the soaring wistfulness of The Lotus Eaters’ ‘First Picture Of You’ (a total flashback-to-childhood-summer song).

Eux Autres sidle towards Beat Happening terrirtory with their beaty drums, twanglesome guitars and flat emotion-free = emotion-full indie boy/girl vocals. There are laid-back fuzzy Pavementisms from Downdime (more flashbacks, this time to the Subpop summer of 1990). Wake The President have Scottish vocals, to which I am always rather partial, and rush along on handclaps and old-skool Post-cardy jangles that SNAP! at your desert-boot clad heels. Disasteradio use synths and robot vocoder vocals to come across like Super Furries havin’ a disko with Neu!

The Rocky Nest’s track is called ‘Lenny and Jenny Had One Too Many’ which is very annoying of it. However they make intriguingly odd and fuddled soundz like a lo-fi kitchen-sink T.Rex cranking along. And they feature an ex-Fonda 500 so that’s me sold.

More people-what-used-to-be-in-another-band action from Ray Rumours And The No-Eyed Deers, i.e. Ros what was in Electrelane. Unlike Electrelane, ‘Puddles And Rain’ is very simple, rattley and sparse, but thanks to Ros’ open, girlish voice it has a touching warmth.

Moustache Of Insanity’s (don’t say a word) ‘Living Room Pic-nic’ is like a v.v. cutesie version of Schwervon’s ‘Dinner’ with a bit of Esiotrot for afters. Zipper are indeed zippy, guitars crunching along in a Rosehips sort of way with a not-stopping-for-breath girl vocal. Alaska’s ‘She Was A Rockstar’ is utterly adorable swingin’ pop, a companion pice to ‘Talulah Gosh’ maybe?

What’s this? Why, ‘tis Teenage Fanclub, this year’s righteous headliners. Oh no, it’s ‘Cancion de Viernes’ by Cooper, it just sounds EXACTLY like the Fannies, or maybe EXACTLY like The Fannies being Big Star and The Byrds, lots of lazily jangling guitars and sunkissed harmonies. Num.

Fzzztttt! Bloop! The space-time continuum has gone all hazey! Erk! I can’t tell if it’s then or now, for behold! ‘tis Mighty Mighty with ‘Kiss For The Crowd’! Is that an old track or new ’un? Not sure, I’m not completely au fait with the band’s entire oeuvre you know. Though I did always enjoy, ‘Maisonette’, and ‘Throwaway’, and ‘Built Like A Car’ and ‘Biddy Baxter’ and the picture of Bridget Sea Urchin surfing on an ironing board, and… blimey! what time are they playing?

Imagine Broadcast circa ‘The Noise made By People’ trying to go Ye-ye but then going a bit John Barry instead. You might get ‘Alapati’ by the splendidly/sick-makingly named Marshmallow Kisses. Ver Kisses, as nobody should ever refer to them, are going to include Tim from Hong Kong In The 60s amongst their number when they play at Indietracks, and look here ARE HK60s with their sublime, spider-web in the breeze ‘Disintegration’. If you fancy being soothed for a while by sounds that stroke as gentle as a feather, settle yourself in a pew when HK60s grace the Church stage.

Someone needs to take up the mantle of fine penmanship and top pop ideals left lying around by Belle And Sebastian. Maybe Pocketbooks, or perhaps Butcher Boy, both on fine form here, will get there with their elegantly-crafted pop vignettes.

Ste McCabe’s ‘Public Debate’ is Pete Shelly singing The Ramones' ‘I Wanna Live’ and it brings a welcome buzz of distortion to things. Also, Ste says “My hatred of the Daily Mail is bordering on obsession”. Huzzah! With you there for sure.

Forty-four tracks long, this is a bumper summer special of an album. It’s got music from Sweden, Denmark, Spain, USA, UK, Germany, New Zealand, Japan, Italy, Argentina… and is an excellent way of taking a peek at the soundz going down on the international pop underground. Print out your festival schedule and start asterisking who you're going to see. All aboard!

P.S. This review was written whilst wearing a dress patterned with apple trees, sitting on a sunny beach, occasionally flicking pebbles into the sea. Afterwards I went and ate an ice-cream. True! Facts!

www.indietracks.co.uk
www.makedoandmendrecords.co.uk

Over And Over - The Legends (Labrador Records)

‘Seconds Away’ sounds like The Acid House Kings being played on a badly tuned workshop radio whilst someone embarks on some serious angle-grinding. It is therefore FAB! Candy coated perfect pop embedded in ferocious spitty sparks. This is The Legends, and this isn’t just any old Swedey indie-pop to add to the (rather large) pile, ‘cos The Legends are mostly Johan Angergard. Johan’s other bands include Club 8 and pop, um, legends The Acid House Kings. He knows what he’s doing does Johan, hence this album of prism perfect, crystalline pop. Do you love elegant, can’t-see-the-joins, downy-soft, everso slightly yearning Swedish indie-pop? Yes? Me too. Do you ADORE fearsome fuzz ‘n’ feedback and dark mutterings over stand-up drumbeats? I know, isn’t it great?! This is what The Legends have got for you, an album that basically vacillates between the two. It’s not new. But it is fabulously POP!

Album opener, ‘You Won’ is deliciously doomy 80s-esque gloom pop, the sort that The Editors et al have made so annoying, The Legends manage a lightness of touch that hints at early Talk Talk - dark and urgent. ‘Monday To Saturday’ trips over the Acid House Kings’ dew-sparkling lawns as Club 8 lady Karolina Komstedt duets sweetly with Angergard over echoey finger-clicks. The pain killers and afternoon sunlight furze of ‘Heartbeats’ recalls a more numb, less devastated Radio Dept. (whatever happened to..?) ‘Dancefloor’ goes doolally bubblegum, twisting and shouting over a hissy backbeat. ‘Something Strange Will Happen’ is edgily motorik but just can’t help but ripple into a sunshine smile here and there.

This album takes my faves from the olden days and makes them over, all sparkly and fresh like newly fallen snow. Inevitably ( I was a teenage Chain-head) it’s the feedback laced pitch-perfect Reidisms that I (Douglas) hart the most here, the squealing, shredding, squalling ‘Recife’, the blood-thumping rumble of ‘Over And Over’ being Frankenstein-stitched onto some ‘Psychocandy’ offcuts. ‘Always The Same’ is wonderful - The Cardigans mashed up with The Jesus And Mary Chain. Heart-explodingly good pop covered in a thick lacquer of fuzz, the tune EXACTLY The JAMC’s ‘Inside Me’ complete with rumbly bass. Hurrah! Then, to end…My Bloody Valentine. ‘Touch’ is ‘Nothing Much To Lose’ scrubbed up all lovely for its first day at big school. Bless.

The Lovely Eggs – If You Were Fruit (Cherryade)

You know when you’re pottering about innocently and you have to sing a ridiculous made-up song because it’s just appeared in your head and it would be uncomfortable not to? This is the joy of The Lovely Eggs, they seem to be singing and songing so freely, grabbing tunes and words and instruments at will as music comes exploding out.

Quite often, actual Lovely Eggs songs come into my head during these pottering moments, especially the song that introduced me to their odd-popping, story-book world, the fab ‘Have You Heard A Digital Accordion?’ heard here on their FIRST! album, a chuggy chug along Velvets / Jonathan Richman pop masterpiece.

And that’s not nearly the half of it. ‘If You Were Fruit’ is a crammed junkshop treasure trove of curious, charming, engaging tunes. These are songs about intriguing things that you want to hear about e.g. the problems involved in cooking for sharks, ‘We’re not at ease if we’re not cooking with cheese’ (‘Mices’). Or the title track which sweetly compares someone to types of fruit, “If you were a coconut then I’d wanna be your husk, I would protect you when you fell in the dust”.

This isn’t novelty pop, or ickily cutesy nonsense, this is exploring pop sounds in an interesting, offbeat manner using pleasing unconventional instrumentation. ‘Luna Café’ involves the excellent employment of a swanee whistle - it’s impossible to be grumpy to the sound of a swanee whistle. Holly sings in a girlish voice with northern vowels. Nice to hear a proper accent – that’s folk music, that.

They play acoustic ukulele stumalongs (‘Oh The Stars’); fuzzy, growly stomp-ups (‘I Like Birds…’); thumpy, noddy droney-drones (the fantastic ‘Big Red Car’ sung with big-hearted top of the voice joy); sweet Syd Barrett cycledelia, (‘Hey There Woodsman!’). ‘Sexual Cowboy’ is a glorious fizz-bomb with a see-sawing ‘Blister In The Sun’ tune; ‘Where’s My Animal’ nicks a bit off ‘I Saw Mummy Kissing Santa Claus’ to gently lullaby by. Shimmery shiverer ‘The Best Moon This Side Of Town’ is a beaty ‘Pale Blue Eyes’ beauty.

Clockwork, tick tock, tippy tap, cuckoo kachoo, sing-song, stick in your head, tinkling, chiming, ringing, rattling, rustling, spoons tinging on teacups. The Lovely Eggs can be an energy burst explosion or delicate and affecting. Sometimes all in the same song.

http://www.myspace.com/thelovelyeggs

Projekt A-ko – Yoyodyne (Milk Pie Records)

‘A-ko seems to be near invulnerable with superhuman speed and strength.’ (Wikipedia article on anime character Eiko Magami).

Urusei Yatsura – they were so FAB! So let’s all cheer for the existence of Projekt A-ko – three quarters of Urusei who are maintaining the anime theme and still applying themselves to the art of teasing out cheerily discombobulating noise from guitars and things. Shout hip hip! and give a big scrabbly guitar squawk of joy at the arrival of Projekt Ako’s album - only two thousand years in the making but worth the wait.

‘Yoyodyne’ sounds like the electromagnetic field flexing and flipping out there in the cosmos, whipping across the universe to land jittering in your head with a Space Dust pop explosion. It’s robots with cracked hearts. Skullz and flowers. Gleefully tuneful turmoil. A big thrill. Attack, attack, attack!

Listen carefully and you can catch the sound of static, fizzling and squealing, fading in from another galaxy, getting closer…tune in and explode into ‘Hey Palooka!’ take a nosebleed nosedive into thrillingly crunchy fuzzpop. A good start.

‘Nothing Works Twice’ will have you reminiscing about dancing like a goon to ‘Kewpies Like Watermelon’ (and that time Fergus jumped into the crowd after a heckler git). Then it’ll have you dancing like a goon. ‘Supertriste Duxelle’ is a discordant sunshine pop wail, My Bloody Valentine doing bubblegum thrash. ‘Molten Hearts’ runs amok, a rollercoaster hijack, kicking up sparks of feedback, demanding you sing along with a thrill in your heart and mad eyes. ‘Otaku Blue’ very cutely plays around with ‘Union City Blue’, but with more squealing and squalling than Blondie ever managed, and with a mighty thunderousness that wraps rainbows round your heart and squeezes. Hard.

This album is crammed with manic pop spills that make me feel all energetic and effervescent and overexcited. It’s an electricity overload, delicious noise textured like years and years worth of paint built up in multi-hued blistered layers.

And then you come across ‘Yoyodyne (Scintilla II)’, twinkling up at you hidden amongst the mass of electric cables and distortion pedals. It’s all gentle and lilting, with strings and ‘ba da las’. Fergus’ and Elaine’s voices sweet and sincere and leaving you a little bit bereft at the end. It wrong-foots you, but is so very right.

“Here comes Kitten she’s vaguely smitten” – ‘Black Empire’

www.projektako.co.uk/yoyodyne

First Frost - The Lucksmiths (Fortuna Pop!)

It’s a freezing November day, I’m wrapped in a blanket, head-fugged with a cold. ‘First Frost’, an album themed around the concept of city vs. country (FITE!), takes me on an armchair journey and shows me snapshots of different, distant days, a welcome distraction. There’s a lot of weather in this, The Lucksmiths’ eleventh album. Pretty much every song summons the elements; summer on skin, planting rainbows, wind from the north, cold autumn air, a sultry night, leaning into the winter wind.

The rattley, Morrissey-like ‘Up With The Sun’ opens with the evocative couplet ‘New sun behind me, like syrup on my skin / Honey remind me where it is we’ve been’ sung perfectly. Later on in the song, cripes! The Lucksmiths break out some splendid fuzz guitar. Mark Monnone’s ‘South-East Coastal Rendezvous’ kicks along nicely, riven with cracked, jubilant guitar that’s cheerily at odds with the song’s lyrical concerns of wandering in the rain getting hopelessly drenched.

On first listen, ‘A Sobering Thought (Just when One Was Needed)’ prompted an outbreak of seventies-style hands on hips, bending at the waist dancing in the Painting household such is the buoyant nature of its guitar riffage. Today I feel too feeble to move so instead I read the lyrics which initially seem to insinuate they’re about doing a wee on the floor when drunk*, ‘You’re puzzled by the puddles on the floor / It’s time that I came clean about last night.’ Later in the song, it’s a relief to find out that the puddles are in fact the result of a spot of drunken swimming pool breaking and entering.

The fantastically titled ‘The National Mitten Registry’ includes what sounds like a colliery brass band adding to its melancholy waltz (although according to the sleeve notes there are just three people playing various brass instruments) and is apparently written from the point of view of a lost glove (metaphor? Pah!). Twee!!!

The album’s lyric booklet features dreamy photos of sunlight glancing across the misty, frosty garden of the Tasmanian studio in which The Lucksmiths holed themselves up for the creation of this record. The place looks rustically magical and is a pretty convincing argument for escaping to a life of rural calm.

Between them, The Lucksmiths (all of the band have contributed songs here) use hopes, dream, memories, regrets to weave an album you can sink into, a blanket of warm sound. I blow my nose for the ten thousandth time, put ‘First Frost’ on for another spin and daydream my way out of London.

*Most men when questioned admit to mistaking the wardrobe for the lav during at least one drunken nocturnal toilet run, I’ve never really understood this.

The Lilac Time – Pelle Carlberg (Labrador Records)

Once again, Labrador Records prove themselves to be impeccable pop pickers with this latest release from Pelle Carlberg, engaging Swedish songwriter and sometime leader of eloquent popsters Edson.

On ‘The Lilac Time’, Carlberg wryly inspects his life, spinning tales of everyday glory and frustration, singing in a laconic, twinkle-eyed way, a little like fellow Scandi pop merchant Jens Lekman. Carlberg’s bittersweet lyrics make you smile along with his bemusement, irritation and overall twisted wistfulness: the excitement of exploring the city as a teenager and then getting miserably mugged, being told by a Facebook quiz that his mental age is fifty-one, the dippy, slightly melancholy fun to be had getting together with long lost friends.

Carlberg’s guitar is complemented by elegant instrumentation that gleams charmingly from each song; woodblocks, cowbells, Wurlitzer, whistling, cello, viola, melodica, piano. On the quietly angry ‘Animal Lovers’Carlberg’s voice fits perfectly with a mournful French Horn motif. Club 8’s Karolina Komstedt duets sweetly on the exuberant pop-rush of ‘Nicknames’, which, with its motoring V.U. rhythms, snappy woodblock and swirling Wurlitzer tune, is a sure-fire indie-pop club floor-filler. The lushly groovy ‘1983’ eloquently captures the thrills and spills of teenage boyhood, complete with mid-song talky anecdote bit. ’51,3’ bowls along with ‘no I’m really feeling quite cheerful, honest’ whistling and splendidly fuzzy guitar that summons thoughts of Teenage Fanclub.

‘Fly Me to the Moon’ is an amusing hate-song to Ryanair. Jaunty whistling belies the disgust and frustration leaking from the lyrics. It has an inordinately catchy chorus, the words to which I type in full here so everyone who’s had the miserable misfortune of flying with the ‘airline of shite’, to quote Carlberg, can sing along:
‘I’ll never fly with you again Ryan
Never again I swear
Guess it would kill you to be respectful
Friendly and even care’.

www.pellecarlberg.se
www.labrador.se

Blow Up Records

Blow Up – we’ve all done our hip wee mod shoe shuffles down at Blow Up at some point in the club’s history. Be it at the (long gone) Laurel Tree in Camden when the place was clogged with members of Menswear and Spanish mods questioning me closely on the make of my scooter (er, the non-existent make). Or at the (also long gone, hmm, there’s a theme emerging here) Wag Club, grooving to the bands and clambering up and down the stairs. Or possibly even hanging out after a Saturday night gig in the stinky (literally - the place smells of toilet cleaner) old Metro. But, you know, Blow Up do records too! They’re a record label with all sorts of eclectic musics to choose from. Lets have a look, eh?


Baltic Fleet is a road movie of an album. Not a sun-dappled, rolling out along the blacktop dose of Americana, but something more European and cerebral. Written by keyboard player Paul Fleming whilst on tour with Echo and the Bunnymen, the album works beautifully as a series of sonic snapshots, moments snatched and captured amidst the flurry of life on the road. Almost entirely instrumental, it’s a collection of musical mood pieces that spin from thumping beats and harsh electronica (‘Double Door’, the Nordic drone-rave of ‘Reykjavik Promise’) to delicate flickers of sound eked out sparingly (the ruminative ripples in a pond of ‘Pebble Shore’). The tracks that do deal explicitly with the U.S. still sound European. The graceful ’48 Hour Drive (Boston)’ is soothing, speaking of grey dawns and foggy eyes, of endless miles being eaten up in a mesmerising blur. ‘To Chicago’ with its flashes of female vocals is other-worldly and drowsy and gorgeously Neu!-ish.

Opener ‘Baltic Intro’ is essentially a drum solo with wibbling, wooshing noises, trains rattling down tunnels and Will Sergeant’s guitar samples. Don’t get the fear though, as this is followed by ‘Black Lounge’s’ serious motorik pummelling, a delicious autobahn beat straps you into the song nice and snug, like a Krautrockin’ safety-belt and you’re away. There are all sorts of sonic textures to be tempted by - wooshy, beepy bits; fair helpings of echoy, shoegazey guitar strummage – the sumptuous, staring out to sea kind; portentous piano playing; luxuriant soundscapes to lose yourself to. This is 21st Century Kosmiche musik, a round the world trip you can take with your eyes closed.

http://www.myspace.com/balticfleet

Cosmic shenanigans of an entirely Other order come courtesy of The Bongolian (aka multi-instrumentalist Nasser Bouzida). From the title, you may be forgiven for thinking ‘A Psychedelic Trip to Outer Bongolia’ is nowt but a cheeseball goof-fest, possibly even a goofball cheese-fest – kitschy lounge doings of the sort made ‘popular’ for two seconds in the late nineties by the likes of Bob Downe. But, hurrah! that’s not what The Bongolian is about at all. This isn’t easy listening for ironic twatsters, this is galactically groovy space soul. There’s a lot of hard-core Hammond action, great swathes of funky organ twiddling demanding you immediately cut a rug. ‘Feel it’ is The Spencer Davies Group kicking it in tin-foil space-suits. ‘Rock Me’ is snotty sixties garage spun into orbit, stomping along on a dirty bass-line, then weirding out amongst the stars with some oddball whirry bleeping sounds. ‘The Horn’ switches pleasingly between a sweetly summery organ riff and sinuous 70s cop show funk. ‘Space Meter’ is a low-down, hip-swinging psychedelic astro groove that Primal Scream are wishing they thought of. ‘Paris Colonade’, sounds like a breezily sophisticated spin around the city and we’re promised Holly Golightly is somewhere on the track amongst the Gitane-tinged ‘la la la las’. ‘Marimba Down At The Hare’ contrasts elegant, almost Japanese sounding marimba playing with some slippery jazz piano.

All this, the album sleeve urges you to note, created in an entirely sample-free environment, with a spot of backwards guitar where needed - just like in the olden days when tricksy playing and a canny ear was all the eager sonic explorer had to hand. And a primed set of bongos, of course.

http://www.bongolian.com/

Mockingbird Wish Me Luck are yet more Swedes going pop! Orchestral pop with a wee nod to Belle and Sebastian in their stylings to be precise (check their record cover design).
Their album ‘Days Come and Go’ is chocka with rinky-dink tunes that fill out into sweet-hearted, expansive sing-alongs thanks to some nifty instrumentation. There’s mariachi brass expanding the songs into super wide screen sunset anthems, folkily baroque trills of flute, ice-cream tingles of glockenspiel... Mockingbird Wish Me Luck are an eight-piece band and they sound like it.

Centre-piece song ‘Days Come And Go’ packs all in all of the above and chucks in a massed choir of voices for good measure, ensuring that epic sweep is full-on. “Take me out tonight, take me somewhere where someone cares” they sing, lyrically echoing The Smiths on ‘Let’s Watch The Sunrise’, a catch-in-the-throat, banjo-plucking pop lament soothed smooth with brass and percussion. ‘Step In Concrete’ lilts along irresistibly, twinkling amongst Afro guitars, topped with a trumpet solo. ‘New Beginnings’ is made for doing an indie-pop quickstep too. ‘Summer Again’ winds up with a Camberwick Green music box whirr built from banjos and glockenspiel, toyshop pop. By the time ‘Days Come and Go’ has been and gone, you’ll be fully summer-shined. A pop album for picnic days and warm nights of dancing with all the windows open.

http://www.myspace.com/mockingbirdwishmeluckswe

I Felt My Sad Heart Soar – Kelman

This is a three-track sampler for Kelman’s rather excellently titled forthcoming second album and a very pleasing thing it is indeed. The band have built on their melancholic, alcoholic tear-stained sound, gently prising it open to let in wisps of fresh air. They say they’re aiming for a rawer sound, closer to their live excursions (which can be heart-wrestingly, wrist-snappingly wonderful) whilst keeping the warmth and intimacy of their debut. And jings! I think they’ve achieved this.

Kelman have warmth and intimacy for sure, at times you feel embarrassed to be eavesdropping on Wayne Gooderham’s thoughts. Take former single ’Is This How It Ends?’ reprieved here with its shiveryness and blood pumping in the ears rumble and the words ‘On the brink of something big. I’ve never known failure like this…’ You want to blush and look away, but icicle-drops of glockenspiel drip into a swell of guitar and organ and you cling on until seascape cymbals shimmer you towards a big finish, rushing impulsively over the edge.

‘Commercial Road’ sees Kelman in almost-optimistic-mood-shocker! It takes some song-writing ability to write anything of beauty about this particular East End street, but here is an affecting song filled with soft ripples of delight. A gentler, more soothing sound with twinkly bits and brass tones (you can’t be down when the brass kicks in) and those words, "I felt my sad heart soar". Hang on though, what’s this? "Oh Lord I need a drink". Oh dear.

There’s a lot of drunkenness in Kelman’s songs, and it seems like the new album will see more booze-fuelled long dark nights of the soul. This is, of course, no bad thing, as Kelman are quiet masters of the art. ‘Shut A Final Door’ sees Mr Gooderham "drunk in charge of a wired jealous heart" sliding through Tindersticks territory with cello and piano until everything cracks wide open on a jubilant organ riff and redemptively strummed guitar. Sounds to make your heart soar coming soon. Can’t wait!

http://www.kelmanband.com/

Feel The Beat And Do It Anyway - Sparky's Magic Piano

I’m not quite sure where this record has come from, but I’m sure glad it’s here! What an unexpected pop jewel, winking coyly in the sunlight. This album is short and sweet, it’ll take up just 36.36 minutes of your time ladies and gentlemen, but that’s 36.36 minutes jolly well spent, especially if you’re in the market for some cute but not cloying, witty but not clever-clever, sassy electro-indie-pop. What you get are what could be deemed weally wather twee songs (vocalist Marion’s prime instrument here is a glockenspiel) if it weren’t for the fact that they’re beefed up with a cornucopia of bedroom boffin sounds. This is a whirligig of noise: deeply squidgy electronica, feather-light synths, plinking, twinkling, soary, squeezy, - sounds poured in and stirred round and round to create electro-pop wonders.

‘Like Falling In Lo*e’ opens the album with an esoteric fizzing and humming that makes it sound like all kinds of experimental shenanigans are about to commence, but no! Sparky’s Magic Piano shower us with ba ba bas, jangling and buzzing gloriously. This is indie-pop!

‘Mend’ cranks and huffs, rumbles, squeaks and fuzzes behind Marion and Oliver’s girl/boy harmonising – a pop factory run amock. ‘Coffee Song’ is Tender Trap put in the wash with The Projects – kitchen sink indie-girl pop pepped up with diminutive motorik beeps. ‘Something Somewhere’ is oddly reminiscent of Apples In Stereo, a busy, buzzy clockwork toy of a tune, although it sounds thoroughly English thanks to Marion’s icing sugar vocals. Her sweet voice sounds like the smell of Lush Candy Fluff powder.

‘Sparky’ and ‘You Like Her’ are acoustically strummed and unadorned proving that the band have the tunes to throw off their gleeful, bleep-full layers of sound and go sonically naked save for a strategically placed glockenspiel. The second half of the album sees Sparky’s Magic Piano coming over all wistful with a sweetly rueful run of songs. ‘Kaleidoscope’ is a shy anthem-in-waiting, sighing and aching. ‘You Are The Star’ is a bit Trembling Blue Stars; slowly filling with brittle beats, ghostly merry-go-rounds twirling and rain splashing on shining streets. ‘Home Improvement’ has the wintery dreaminess of The Radio Dept with its delicious catch-in-the-voice sinking feeling.

We all know there’s nothing new under the big old Crayola-ed indie-pop sun, but ‘Feel The Beat And Do It Anyway’ is cheerily refreshing. An instantly endearing sunbeam.

www.myspace.com/sparkysmagicpiano

www.melodyfactory.com/shop

The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Dreaming – Club 8 (Fortuna Pop!)

Club 8 are Johan (also to be found in The Legends and spanglingly mighty indie-pop maestros the Acid House Kings with whom Club 8 share a glittering acheyness to their at-first-glance perky popsongs) and the sweet-voiced Karolina. This is their sixth album. I’ve dipped into the band on occasion before, thanks to those wonderful curators of all things Swedey pop, Labrador records, and its nice to see them getting some UK action via Fortuna Pop! records.

On first listen, Club 8 make gentle, comforting music; the caress of Karolina’s breathy vocals, pattering beats, swirls of syrupy keyboards. It’s covered in a light dusting of icing sugar, powder perfect, sweet, slightly twinkling. Imagine a sparkling, Scandi Saint Etienne. But actually Club 8 are quite bleak, with a staring-into-space detachment to their sound. Maybe that’s not icing sugar dusting the songs, but frost. There’s a deliciously glum cast to even the ostensibly upbeat songs here, hinting at a heaviness of heart. Take recent download smash hits ‘Whatever You Want’ and ‘Heaven’*. The former canters along cheerily, with a seemingly carefree, handbag-swinging breeziness, kicking its heels to, ooh, get this, sampled Tropicalia percussion. ‘Heaven’ meanwhile, skips about with thrumming bass and bossa beats before launching into a soarily jubilant little chorus. But there’s a guardedness to the vocals; listen to what they’re saying – grieving over a long-lost youth and the inevitable encroachment of death. Reading the album’s lyrics is discomforting:

"I feel tired tonight / keep me out of sight".
"where birds don’t fly / that’s where I’m going to be"
Club 8’s last words here, as the glowing synth sound fades, are "All you wanted to say was goodbye. / Goodbye".

On the band’s web site, this record is described (rather cutely) as ‘Twelve songs that’ll make you sing along to songs about death while dreaming of summer days’. Maybe it’s because I’m listening to this in December, but ‘The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Dreaming’ doesn’t immediately strike me as a summer record. If this is sunshine pop, then it’s for a summer experienced through a dislocating haze of anti-depressants. ‘Sometimes’ skates and tumbles on skittering beats and leafy synths, tripping deliciously on minor chords. The brooding, rumbly ‘Leave The North’ is suggestive of dark clouds racing across stormy skies, splashes of sunlight breaking through.

‘The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Dreaming’ is an album that sounds like warm breath steaming up frosty windows, fairy lights reflected in faraway eyes, and smiles going distant and dreamy whilst ice cubes melt into vanilla vodka. I tried listening to it on the tube to work and it didn’t sound right, it needs to be listened to in the evening, used as an aural duvet when the dark is drawing in and the lamps are lit. Melancholic medicine with a bittersweet after-taste

* Available from December 10th as free downloads at www.club-8.org/

Ectogram – Fluff On A Faraway Hill (Klangbad)

Ectogram come from Wales. They have close links with legendary German avant-garde music makers Faust. I mention these things in case they strike you as relevant. Some other points: Ectogram are a band of three people who sound like many more. On their web site, they are referred to as ‘Wales' premier post-tonal dronedelic noiseniks’. ‘Fluff on A Faraway Hill’ is their sixth album.

Ectogram songs build scrabbly, twiggy nests in your head, then scuffle about up there like critters in the loft. Ectogram songs are elemental - they feel like their component parts consist of unidentifiable organic matter; of mysterious dusts and curious stones, eerie weather and unusual mosses. They are constructed of discombobulating layers of textural noise that have a stick-in-your-teeth chewiness. That’s not to say that they make for ‘difficult’ listening though, these are strongly melodic works – you can hum along as sparks of sound snag in the curtains and tendrils of tune whip around the bookcases.

The tracks: ‘Devisor’ warps and drones with a mystical Eastern undertow over bendy skew-whiff notes, whilst vocalist/guitarist Ann Matthews ululates in a girlish tone. For nine minutes ‘Unterrock’ is an exhilarating headlong race through a bewildering forest of pulsing sound, where branches whip back and belt you in the face with little shrieks, with scribbling guitar and lyrics intoned as a mantra. ‘Aspic Liner’ bends and bows in a curiously soothing manner, you can imagine giving yourself up to its rubbery embrace and falling backwards into the dense mattress of sound it weaves from relaxedly epic guitar lines, hypnotic drum rounds and layers of Ann’s voice chanting buried-deep lyrics. It’s good that the album comes with a lyric booklet as it's intriguing to read what’s going on in these songs, ‘a dream of times swollen when crusts made hair curly’ or ‘deer stalker, forest running, algae blooming’, and ‘curmudgeon with his knees bent double’.

The dizzy-making ‘Spanner’ is pleasingly disorientating, its elastic guitar stretching and snapping back in a cheerily sickly manner. Noir-ish night-mare jazz-inflected ‘Toolbox’ slithers on flanging guitar and lullaby rhythms before cracking up into flying scraps of tune that flap about like bats on strings and you try not to get them in your hair. ‘Strategy Theme’ has lovely bell-like Dungen-style guitar ‘licks’ (if you will), that gallop and shudder across a bedrock of rattling, echoy drums and serenely gliding vocals. It sounds like the sun shining too brightly and is a sublime note on which to end.

‘Fluff On A Faraway Hill’ is playfully exploratory, packed with noise-making ideas skilfully interwoven to create some fearsome, tough-sounding psychedelia. An immersive sound-scape for hiding yourself in, camouflaged amongst the strange plant-forms. Not dreamy, more the sound of nature red in tooth and claw.

http://www.centralslate.omnia.co.uk/