Otterley seem to have come straight out of the Postcard era back when guitars used to jangle and chime and boys were skinny and had indie fringes. Obviously I am all for this and Otterley’s two self-released EPs are something of a dream come true for indie nostalgics such as myself. They’re not content to merely hark back to the past though with electronic beats bubbling in and out of these songs. What really sets them apart and stops them from falling into the Postal Service indie/electronica cliche are Gerard’s angelic, yearning vocals (also to be heard in the similarly wonderful Findo Gask) which are unashamedly sung in his lovely Fife accent. When his voice catches on a phrase your heart does break.

From the jangliest guitars this side of Johnny Marr that end up twinkling and sighing (In Camera) through harder distorted electronics that soon tip back into Nintendo bip-bop (Sferics) to Kirsten’s almost too cute for words sassy almost-rapping (Idea Fixed) Otterley bring together the precociousness of early Aztec Camera, the lush oddness of Boards of Canada and the heartbreak of the Field Mice into something all their own. In fact, it’s Gregory’s Girl made into song.

But don’t just take my word for it – both these EPs are available for free download from their website. On you go.

www.otterley.co.uk
www.myspace.com/otterleymusic

A few short months since our review of Quack Quack’s debut mini-album/EP (hey, it’s five tracks and 25 minutes long. You call it what you want), and here comes two more songs on yet another excellent release on the consistently fine Run of the Mill Records label.

Seeing as this is a double-A side single, I whacked on the 45rpm “The Great Catsby” side. Initially propelled by a dinky casio keyboard drum machine and some wonderfully slinky percussion, this song is founded upon some real carney-sounding keyboards worthy of your favourite silent comedy stars falling about a screen at your local cinemahouse, playing one of those melodies that you swear you’ve heard before, but know you’ll never manage to get out of your head. From these beginnings, the introduction of some joyfully bouncy bass powers the song into full speed ahead with some fantastically sweet drummage action. Crammed full to the brim with joi de vivre and beautifully to the point, this track is a winner.

Flip the wax over and “Mars” plays at 33rpm. It also happens to be possibly the peachiest track I’ve heard yet from these cats. For some sections of this song erstwhile keyboardist Moz sticks down some keys to get some hot droning action and clambers behind his own kit for some dual-drum lovin’ on this one. Taking on a slightly darker and more percussive guise for this track suits Quack Quack well, as they take the extra time afforded by the 33rpm format to do a little more exploring of their textures and rhythms in between the sweetsweet interaction of keyboard and bass melodies and of course the hothot drums. Watching these fellas perform this sucker live in the flesh a couple of weeks ago was the highlight of my night, and I’d recommend the experience to anyone. Similarly, if you’ve any interest in some sublime instrumental music made by three fellas from Leeds, you need this slice of cheer-inducing genius.

www.runofthemillrecords.com

It starts with a frail wispy a capella melody: “There’s a bug in my head/And it’s making me dead”.

“Ah!” thinks the listener. “This will be whimsical indie.”

But just as he reaches for his slippers and viola, the poor defenceless tune is jumped by savage feedback and pounding drums swathing it in sheets of noise. Then, it breaks down into a kind of deranged solo guitar sea shanty bit backed with eerie vocal harmonies, before morphing again into the kind of BIG ROCK RIFF that Faith No More used to carve out of solid granite. Finally the original melody resurfaces alongside an urgent hypnotic chant of “Blow yourself up/Set yourself free”, before the whole thing drowns in blissful screaming and noise.

Whimsical isn’t quite the word for it.

I like Akira a lot. They engage in a similar kind of noisemongering hi-jinks to the Test Icicles, but with a style and a way of mixing experimental structure and brutal noise with pure pop melodies that is all their own. They’re no one-trick pony either: the B-side “Atom” threads a yearning starry-eyed vocal through a junkyard of fractured cut-up guitars, ghostly squeals and other detritus that is somehow weirdly beautiful. And to show that they’re not studio-ridden boffins, there’s a bonus live track too. Nice one.

www.akiraband.com
www.myspace.com/akiraband
www.myspace.com/wreckfest

Spraydog have been quietly plugging away with their comfortably familiar brand of fuzzy indie pop for about a decade now, and it’s almost in their favour that as independent music in the main now seems more backward-looking than ever, they’ve stuck to their guns. This means that here there is no knowing irony, no nods to new wave, no desparation for Myspace-heavy, hey-we-could-get-signed-with-this mainstreaming. Whether it’s a good thing that hearing this kind of lazy male/female vocal fighting for vinyl space with warm, rough-edged sweeping guitar lines provokes thoughts of bands that were around at the time of Spraydog’s birth – Superchunk, Pavement, Boyracer, etc – or not, it’s hard not to enjoy the simplicity of decent, buzzing, morose pop music. It’s far from revolutionary or devastatingly exhilarating, but music is currently drenched in seriousness and desperately new music of varying degrees of success. Sometimes it’s no bad thing to play and listen to music for music’s sake.

Spraydog

Smokers Die Younger appear at first to exist in that currently-popular musical sphere of wry social commentary set to varying eighties-tinged degrees of new-wavey pop. But across this album there are a number of things that, for me, set them way apart from (and in front of) many contemporaries. To explain a specific few of these things: the Breeders-like wailing vocal interludes on ‘I Spy Dry Fear’; the sudden bursts into incredible, lush, horn-tinged musicality on ‘It’s coming straight for us!’; the beautifully sad, beautifully simple jaunt into country blues territory on ‘Three cigarettes in an ashtray’ and the final track’s development from meaningless vocal repetition into bizarre, pounding lo-fi techno. Aspects like these, when combined with the approachable, off-kilter, Pavement-go-angry-indie-pop sound at the core of Smokers Die Younger, result in a richly varied album that hints at true musicianship that is yet to be reigned in by industry pressure, self-consciousness or a reluctance to give things a go in the hope that they work. And they work!

Thee SPC
Detail Recordings
Smokers Die Younger

For a CD chosen at random from a box at a party, this did not bode well. The cover depicts the artist in the style of one of those rastaman cartoons that in poster form adorn the bedroom walls of adolescent boys between Jordan and “Take Me To Your Dealer”. There’s a track called “Ganjaholic”, for fuck sake.

So, to the Leano, Sri Lankan-origin, London-based MC whose debut album this is, I owe an apology of sorts: this shit ain’t bad. “Steps to Leanoland” is 13 tracks of fuzzy dub/hip-hop beats, nice stripped-down production and Mr. L himself rhyming away with brains and some panache on a variety of ISSUES. Musically, we’re paddling in the same murky waters as Roots Manuva, although what the Leano lacks in the former’s abstract and inventive wordplay he tries to make up in the breadth of his ideas. So on “Twisted Tongues”, he sensitively dissects the identity crisis of a second-generation immigrant, caught between a mother culture he can’t fully understand and an adopted country which keeps him at arms length. “Sex and Lies” uses a sweet little twisted piano loop to challenge media-created myths of male sexuality; which frankly isn’t a debate you’ll hear 50 Cent contributing to any time soon. In fact, sexual dysfunction runs like a thread right through the album from the almost scarily honest account of a paranoia-fuelled impotence attack on “They Don’t Know What We Know”, to the confession “Doctor, doctor I’ve got a psychological error/Every time I wank I see the same terror” on “Messing With My Mind”. The Leano may be in sore need of a couch and a detailed psychoanalysis of his childhood (or maybe just to lay off the smoke a little), but it sure as hell beats the kind of alpha-male fantasy willy-jousting that dominates so much of the genre.

Having said all this, the real problem with this album is the growing sense you get a few tracks in that it’s not really going anywhere, that the meandering pace and gentle musing is all there is. Our boy never really breaks a sweat throughout, even on the more up-tempo “Music We Love” which has a shot at jungle but can’t really muster up the energy. On “Rolling River”, a dirge about how we’re all part of the same, y’know, consciousness, he seems so dangerously close to the kind of Groove Armada coffee table chillerama that sells sports cars to junior managers, that you find yourself wanting to poke the lethargic bugger with a stick until he yelps and yodels like Ol’ Dirty “Captain Beefheart of Rap” Bastard. That might just be me though… And while the link between cannabis use and wooly, half-baked, slightly paranoid social analysis may not have been conclusively established, the references to TV “brainwashng” everyone and money turning us all into “robots” on this album will certainly give the researchers something to go on.

The Leano’s clearly got a lot to say and the brains to say it – even “Ganjaholic”, the source of my earlier misgivings, turns out to be a thoughtful little reggae ditty about the life of a homeless guy in Hull – but after a few tracks it all starts to seem a little pedestrian. I recommend a two-week boot camp at the Public Enemy school of political agitation to give the young man some direction. Still, as those familiar with my sense of humour will know, no album with a line like “I flow/ Like the faeces that flows from ma arse/Ya know ya know the smell when ya pass/Yes!” will be entirely wasted on me.

Maybe it’s just gaps in my musical education, or a listless, lazy and badly-thought-through response on my part, but much indie-mainstream-guitar music released right now seems drenched in Echo & the Bunnymen influences. Cherubs have that band’s spooky, echoed vocals, sweeping guitars and lush melodies in spades, but I’m happy to say that they also have a certain something that sets them apart. It could be that they’re aping the past so accurately that I’m fooling myself into memories of times gone by… but it could as much be that on ‘Paper cut moon,’ this single’s title track, and to a lesser extent on the other tracks here, there are enough great little turns of musical phrase – a major-to-minor key change here, a lovely Marresque guitar corner there – to suggest that Cherubs are at least able to put a good song together. In the current musical climate of identikit, style-over-content ‘indie’ bands, that counts for more than may be a good thing. But it counts for something, at least.

Cargo
Cherubs

You don’t give me much to go on here, do you PR people? A single-track CD, with scant information beyond a release made up of carefully-dropped names (“…support slot for Deep Purple”, “Produced… with the legendary George Young… at London’s Olympic Studios (Studio 1, used by Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix”). Okay, okay, the illusion of mysterious-yet-connected heavy rockers has been created. ‘Into the gutter’ starts up with a riff gnarled from Black Sabbath’s ‘Paranoid’ and quickly power-chords and blues-slides its way into deepest yelping Led Zep/Who/The Darkness* territory. Utterly, utterly derivative and in no way contributing to the furthering of music in new and exciting directions; but I suspect that the band are happy enough where they are. Presumably they’d prefer to be supporting Deep Purple thirty years before now, but there you go.

*ack.

The Answer

‘Out Here In The Woods’ is the refreshingly-odd new EP from London-based Low Sparks. Hipster-baiting opening track ‘She Was Always Cool’ is a cracking song that splices together Beck-style slacker-pop with British Sea Power-esque rural cheeriness before dragging you down the garden-path for some grin-inducing jazz-rock lunacy! Elsewhere their “stark English indie” claims are more-than backed-up with a jittery, literary mix of The Kinks and The Libertines. With so many new London bands convinced that faux-urban-deprivation somehow makes for great pop, Low Sparks are more than happy to trade-in over-familiar tales of council estates and smog for treehouses, fresh air and interesting tunes! A quirky, low-key delight.

www.lowsparks.com

The whole of this album is shot through with some fantastic fuzz bass, holding together a ramshackle selection of tunes with a sturdy, mean-sounding growl. The effect as a whole is akin to Ozzy Osbourne circa 1971 fronting a Queens of the Stone Age covers band made up of ardent Iron Maiden fans. For every dense, hard-riffing twist of a tune there’s a counterpoint of heavy metal mayhem – double kick-drum and portentous vocals aplenty – which delights and confuses in equal measure. As much a part of a just-created-for-the-sake-of-this-review new wave of hard rock spearheaded by the aforementioned QOTSA, Hellacopters and The Mars Volta, as they are a melodic NWOBHM Hard Rock tribute act, Cadillac are doubtless black-clad denizens of the night who occasionally kick back with their MC5 collection and consider their emotions. They rock, this much is true. Whether they rock with the new or the old school remains to be seen.

Kong Tiki Records
Cadillac