09 July 2008

The Feeling – Turn It Up
Horrible derivative cock rock band hawking straight to video seventies guitar hooks have somehow forged a lucrative career playing arena support slots and preening festival appearances like The Darkness were bled of fun like a radiator.

Orphan Boy – Stillettos
Hailing from Grimsby they exude the spirit of lifting themselves out of the cesspool of quotidian life and the way they do this is to have dual front men hankering for your attention. This works sporadically. If you were stuck in a lift you’d listen to them.

Detachments – Fear No Fear
Appropriately two of the Detachments trio met at “an insane squat party” and their brand of claustrophobic industrial with kick drums would wallpaper any lock free room where someone was performing cursory resuscitation as neighbours banged at the door. In Germany in the eighties.

Kora – Flow
Effortlessly blending the desperate housewives choice of smooth caramel vocals with a marching band of support voices giving it a gospel lean, Kiwi collective Kora could easily have been born on some soul man's roof. Better than some of the bland grooves orbiting the radio.

Mumford & Sons – Roll Away Your Stone
Often the only weather cock you can gaze at to give you an inkling of quality is through the record label and Chess Club have patented some early quality which doesn’t dip with this yearning Elliot Smith whimsy. There’s evidence of some sort of medieval instrument in the background.

Midasuno – Sister Temptation
Midasuno are rough around the edges like the work of a careless carpenter but they’re a decent screamer outfit from Wales with vocals that sound female even though band photos show that they’ve all got penises. Gender realignment surgery? Probably not in Wales.

Thomas White – I Dream Of Black
Thomas is a musical magpie fronting The Electric Soft Parade, commandeering the side project Brakes and now with this title track from his solo outing which sounds like he’s away on a psychedelic carpet on a course for a choral showdown with Jason Pierce. Pretty good.

The Hold Steady – Sequestered In Memphis
Much is made of the fact that they used a long word in the title almost as if the music public are so impossibly uneducated that any extension of the word Doo Wop would send them into cataclysms of despair. Pedestrian gravel voiced Americana.

Leon Jean Marie – Bring It On
After a misguided attempt standing in a line-up with a boy band, East London boy Leon corralled Mark Ronson into producing an early single and then lay down this, an accomplished ladies-on-the-dance floor R & B number with a shiny finish like a cleaner working on your linoleum floor.

Attic Lights – Bring You Down
The intro sounds like something that Ash might have rejected in the late nineties as being so jangly it might as well have been a shopping basket at Accessorize. They’re nothing inherently wrong with this brand of catchy chorus (think The Thrills and associated hate feelings) but it’s very anaemic and essentially flies by your memory.

White Denim – All You Really Have To Do
The band look amazing, like your perfect shop assistants dressing for a hot stare from the store manager, and while live they’re a rambunctious proposition on record the haphazard nature of their maelstrom of guitars and vocals does make you poke your ear out.

Royal Treatment Plant – Undercurrent
Boasting a cross between the verve of early The Duke Spirit and the youthful verve of We Start Fires the strings are made to dance to the tune of lead songwriter Paula Steel who “escaped the church as a teenager”. None to biblical thoughts roam into mind on hearing her declare her assured manifesto.

Hadouken! – Crank It Up
Hadouken! look like they rob cars and then boast about it in Faces nightclub, a possible alternative vocation should this excuse for a musical jamboree ever prove too much for their aging scenester fans who also enjoy flitting about an amusement arcade bopping to the sound of tinny coins dropping into slots.

Those Dancing Days – Run Run
There are few record labels that hum quality like Wichita and sure enough the latest release from bashful Swedish popettes These Dancing Days is as bright and sunny as a day out on the planet Mercury. The album’s due as soon as they finish school. Very sick.