Apparently Tim Pare jettisoned his past life in 2004, moved to China for a while and subsequently returned on the Trans-Siberian Express, swapping vodka for a guitar in order to write the six songs on this CD. So goes the story in the liner notes. Whether this is true or not is almost immaterial; the experiences gained with such travels don’t particularly inform these songs, which tell a familiar, yet always effective, boy-met-girl/boy-lost-girl story.

The music here is absolutely sparse, in the main. Pare’s clear, slightly breathy voice floats above simple guitar pickings and strummings. There are some subtle arrangements at work, though, with the addition of backing vocal harmonies, piano, cello and on ‘Losing My Touch’, a lovely female voice. The simplicity of the sound lays the songs bare, and it’s fortunate that they’re beautifully sung, carefully performed and affectingly heartfelt.

Tim Pare’s style leans more towards the singer-songwriter template of the Finn Brothers or (although I hate to say it) The Beautiful South at their quietest, but it retains an important sense of reality, purity and honesty that reflects the spiritual presence of Nick Drake and Crosby, Stills and Nash. It’s a frequently lovely listen, and one that captures moods of both hope and despair with deceptively effortless success.

Mumbo Jumbo Records
Tim Pare

Dolittle is a veritable early-90s-indie-fan’s dream, as the fine diagram to be found on their CD and website makes clear. Ange Dolittle, who did his time in years gone by with Eat, We Know Where You Live and Big Yoga Muffin, has teamed up with Oxfordshire brothers Mr. G and Rich in this new project; and this album is produced by Miles Hunt of The Wonder Stuff and Vent414. It’s like going back in time, and yet not going back in time.

The feel across the twelve tracks here is one of cynical, emotionally-damaged angst, set to a relatively gentle style of off-kilter guitar sing-song simplicity. The music isn’t going to set the world on fire, but it’s pleasant enough listening, with hints of not only the bands mentioned above but also a smattering of the weird guitar popitude of Pavement, Pixies and – at a stretch – Talking Heads.

It’s very much Ange’s show, with his voice mixed to the fore and lyrics delivered in a clear and considered manner. At times the self-consciously bitter and self-deprecating lyrics can grate; as if the desperation to seem as odd and as mixed-up as possible has resulted in lyrics that can be opaque and difficult to relate to. When the guard is dropped, though, as on ‘Shame’ and ‘Epicure’, Dolittle are a far more engaging prospect. They exude real emotion, rather than a shrouded, self-mocking posturing.

With at least two of the tracks here being reworkings of old Eat songs, and one a Wonder Stuff cover, it’s hard to place Dolittle in the context of anything except those happy indie-explosion days of the early 90s. I’m not sure that’s such a bad place to be. Sometimes the present can be too much of a challenge.

Punk Elvis Records
Dolittle

This is an impressively polished six-track EP, with tightness of playing and quality control that is surprising for a band that’s been together for less than a year. Semi Royal Blood may not be setting the world on fire with originality; these songs traverse familiar melodic and lyrical tightropes and suggest a cleaner Libertines, or a messier Razorlight. But in a world that’s currently rich with uninspired soundalike bands, Semi Royal Blood go beyond aping what seem to be obvious reference points. It could be the urgency of the vocals on lead track ‘Quandary’, or the up-there speediness of the keyboard-sprinkled ‘Take It Away’, or the subtly complex guitar lines on ‘Caught With A Feeling’, but here’s a band that seem to show glimpses of something beyond an average standard that’s often depressingly settled upon by many other bands.

For a debut, this is great stuff: it sounds to me like a collection of tracks that could easily stand up against the relentless avalanche of new bands mining this melodic, mini-epic-style of guitar pop. The challenge for Semi Royal Blood is to stay the course, and to hang on to the feelings of enjoyment and genuineness that are on display here. If they can hang in there, and develop their sound into something even more their own, they have a bright future.

Semi Royal Blood

New year, no relenting in the fanboy enthusiasm for everything Wäntage USA hurl out my way. The Lights, for all their twisted melodic pop sensibilities, can’t help but screw everything around with a knife-twist in every track, with a self-effacing need to psych out at the beginning, middle or end. The twisted new wave sensibilities of the Fall intermingle with a gently crazed take on late ’60s garage stomp, and the result is never far from being steamrollered by waves of feedback and noise.

The album opens with a downhearted drone arc of misery, but it lets more light in as time goes by. There are caveman-thrown rocks of melody all over the songs here, but the glorious thing about The Lights is their inability not to chuck in a cement mixer of chaos at the most inappropriate time. They never, however, lose grip of a fundamental danceability, and tracks like White Harlem and Up the Stairs, Out the Window reveal clicking rhythms that recall Q And Not U or early Liars. It’s this paradoxical combination of elements that attracts me to this music. ‘Diamonds And Dirt’ album reads like a mixtape of essentials garage/indie/rock from the past thirty years – but it’s a physically mixed-up tape, rather than a tape of mixed tunes.

This isn’t an album like no other; it’s a distillation and extension of the best albums by (at least) Melvins, Nirvana, Gang Of Four, The Fall, Devo. But which are the best albums? Take a listen and make up your own mind.

Wäntage USA
The Lights

I’ve waited two whole years for a slab of DeSalvo vinyl.
It was worth the wait.

DeSalvo include members of Stretchheads, Dawson, Nostril and, um, Idlewild.
DeSalvo are almost certainly THE BEST metal band in the world right now.

Lurching violent riffs that can’t keep to a time signature for more than a couple of bars, Desalvo move from hulking black metal to atonal faster-than-light avant noise and back in the blink of an eye.

Towering over this racket is the unmistakable scream of P6, who just happens to be one of my favourite singers.
(singers? howlers/screamers/yelpers might be more fitting).

The only thing that’s wrong with this record?

To really hear and understand DeSalvo you need to see them live.
I’ve watched them reduce girls and boys to tears of fear.
They always make up in the end, but a DeSalvo live show is something to behold.

Oh, and the vinyl is BROWN.

All hail the new ROCK.

My building has a free wireless network, so last night I peeked and saw that my neighbor’s iTunes had a few Peter Bjorn and John songs from their new album Writer’s Block. She had a bunch of Cat Power and Joanna Newsom and a couple newer things like New Young Pony Club. But Peter Bjorn and John? I hadn’t even heard the whole record yet and I’m an editor at a New York culture magazine, which made this casual listener’s iTunes a testement to the incredible word of mouth success the sophomore record from the Swedish pop trio is enjoying despite limited marketing in the US, thanks largely in part to the rediculously infectious lead single “Young Folks.”

“Young Folks” revolves around a crisp whistle solo, gentle beats and some of the most alchemical boy/girl switch-verses this side of “Don’t You Want Me,” with the Concretes’ Victoria Bergman cooing indifferently about the hipsters, and choosing the unsure Peter over all the other boring people with even more unsure lines like, “I would go along with someone like you.” The romance of the song is new and intriguing, like when you just say fuck it, and you finally dive into that relationship that’s been brewing, but you’ve never been really sure until now.

Lyrically, the simple expression of small joys and slight losses seems to keep this album always clever and surprising. No one will ever confuse Peter Bjorn and John with the Beach Boys in terms of vocal harmonies. In fact, none of the trio’s almost equally used voices are all that great, but they’re sincere and they’re placed flatteringly with the various emotional highs and lows of the music.

It’s those various shifts in the music that makes Writer’s Block so compelling. They jangle for the Byrds, chime rhythemically for the Chills, bounce along for the Lucksmiths, croon for Jens Lekman. Always there’s a hidden dulcimer or Spanish guitar that climbs its way through the songs and the whole thing just sounds joyous and fresh in a way no other record has sounded to me this year. Too bad I caught on so late.

-Maxwell Williams

V2 Scandinavia & Finland
Wichita Recordings

“Tell Me Something You Do Like” sings Mr. Hibbett in the opening song of this prettily packaged album.
Well, OK Mr. Hibbett, I like your new album.

I’ve been listening to it now for a good two months and you seem to have been stalking me for the last 20 years watching me go to gigs, nearly get beaten up, fall for girls, fall out with girls and act like an arse.

You see, MJ Hibbett is a master of the minutiae of life as an indie schmindie record buying, spectacle wearing clever clogs.

You know that moment you visited London for the first time and got trapped in a tube carriage with a bunch of Gay Activist marchers?
Well, Hibbett was there too and he’s telling the world all about it.
Or the time when you finally realised that, after spending weeks and months telling people, “The Smiths are rubbish”, that deep down you adore them even though they’re hip.
Yup, you guessed it.
He’s way ahead of you again.

This album is witty, fun, clever and intruiging.
Musically it’s a bunch of old fashinoned (in THE BEST sense of the term) indie guitar pop.
Guitar pop like guitar pop used to be.
But then surely that’s part of The Validators schtick – picking up threads of life as it was, things that have happened, and singing them so you KNOW THEY WERE THERE.

As many of you already know, i don’t like music very much.
But this is an album I LOVE.

‘Keeping Up Appearances’ steams in with a certain amount of choppy-guitar riff rock power before quickly striking up a ska-punk vibe that makes me think of grown men with carefully-fashioned mohicans, jumping in V-shapes with baggy shorts whilst a thousand teenagers nod along during a four-hour long Tony Hawk PlayStation session. It’s hard to deny the immediacy and upfront energy that seems to be inherent in Capdown’s music, but it’s hard (for this reviewer, at least) to hear it as much beyond simple, cartoonish punk pop music that often edges more in the direction of Busted than Dead Kennedys.

B-side ‘Serious Is Not A Sin’ is confusing with its combination of a dour title and more of the same high-speed, super-efficient and super-polished glee-rock. Despite some attractive pseudometal widdly-diddly soloing, and in spite of some tentative dub-light passages, it seems too simplistic in its effortlessness: I prefer more chaos and more mess in my music, and Capdown here seem unfortunately polished to the point of being bland.

Capdown
Fierce Panda

Any band with pretensions of making it ‘big’ needs at least one killer track in its musical arsenal. You know the one, the track that jerks you from your sonic dogmatic slumber and makes you believe in the power of song again. It makes you say to yourself, “Now that is a blinding track” while sinking its aural hooks into you.

Well, I heard one of those today. It happened when I played Secret Chiefs, a demo EP from a band called Superkings. The track’s called Hit The Ground Running, an understated epic of a song, brim-full of imagery and allusion, a tale of ennui and yearning in a strange, seemingly perpetual and intense sexual relationship.

And it’s not a one-off either. Secret Chiefs contains two or three first-magnitude gems, and showcases a band that seems remarkably at ease with itself, one that can turn its hand to a number of styles while retaining its core sound. Superkings are a group that appear to know that while they might not always be flavour of the month in the fickle world of the music press, they are nevertheless ready, and expect, to make the break from obscurity.

I, for one, would not be surprised. This band is a definite ‘one-to-watch’ for 2007.

Superkings
Feedback Records

A quote from The Cubes’ press release states that if Syd Barrett were still alive today, he’d sound like the lead singer, Marc Donovan. Some claim indeed, and one that might have some credence if Mr Donovan came anywhere close either lyrically or musically. Unfortunately, he doesn’t. He sounds like exactly what he is – a twenty year old with a few precious songs which fail to escape their influences rather than drawing on them to create something familiar, yet still individual. This is hardly a surprise, though. On the plus side, these four songs aren’t bad, and there is potential here. But, hey guys, lay off the ridiculous hyperbole a bit and get on with finding your own musical voice. The musical elements and arrangements are interesting enough to suggest this is achievable.