The album version of ‘You Don’t Know Me’ is the second track on this 12″, having been usurped by Howie B’s more-than-twice-as-long remix. This makes sense to me, as the short original album version from Mumbai-based Mukul is a heavily Tricky-influenced slice of loping trip-hop, with sleepy beats and gravelled vocals. It seems unfortunately relegated to a particular time in the past. Howie B’s remix leaves nothing much beyond heavily-treated snippets of vocals, peppering them over a superb seven-minute early-house-style evocation of simplicity and repetition; crystal clear metronomic beats underlying bouncing bubbles of synth.

Third track ‘Happy Birthday’ is an elegant mix of the styles of the first two tracks – slowly modulating acid-style melodies firing off between bass tones, topped off with those wasted-style vocals. It’s ever so slightly as if Mukul has been playing a little too much with his Reason loops – he seems to lack the mastery of simplicity evident in Howie B’s remix – but there are glimmers of darkness here which suggest the possibility of a new take on an all-too-familiar trip-hop sound.

Mukul

San Franciscans The Weegs have got that whole New-York-early-80s-no-wave-mayhem thing going down, not least in terms of vocal delivery – the lyrics are presented in the form of yelps and exclamations that evoke skinny weirdos contorting around microphones whilst self-harming in the centre of the (slightly afraid) audience.

Musically, they’re more sedate and melodic than the early no-wave noise of your Sonic Youths and your DNAs, but they get their freaky thrills in other ways. The nine tracks here are tight like post punk, but messy like punk. Stabs of guitar play off loudly-mixed synth parps, with a rhythm section laying down broken-leg-danceable beats and twisted funk energies. The result is like the first couple of Human League records, if they’d been played by drug-damaged Americans with less sense of style. Excepting the last 45-minute track ‘The Million Sounds’, which is an endurance-testing ramble through sound and texture, this album is made of alien pop songs that share a demented sensibility with Butthole Surfers and Devo; music that is brashly strange and confidently abrasive.

Who knows what they’re like as a live outfit, but this CD makes The Weegs sound like a threatening confrontation of oddness. I’m not sure I’d want to live in their world, but it’s good to have had a glimpse.

The Weegs
Hungry Eye Records

The Davidians were featured on the excellent Psychedelica Volume One compilation with the reverb-heavy, swooning ‘Getting By’. This is included here on this twelve-track album, which follows similar stylistic themes to that track: blissed-out shoegazing guitar music with one foot in the dreamy Californian desert of the late ’60s, the other in the introspective, effects-drenched world of Ride, Slowdive, Spiritualized, the Telescopes and so on.

As the album goes by, the mood rarely deviates from a sleepy-eyed, drowsy tempo. Vocals are delivered in a soft drawl that heavily recalls Richard Ashcroft when The Verve were at their best (circa A Northern Soul, as if you need to know), and the music is a fantastic blur of echoed, sweet guitar, with Hammond organ tones filling out the background. It’s to the Davidians’ credit that they don’t let the soporific nature of this music dip into a dirge – it’s carefully handled and contains enough melodic richness and drug-addled hypnotic grooviness to keep things fresh.

The music also steers clear of a kitsch ’60s bubblegum trap by introducing dark elements that create a foreboding sense of night on tracks like ‘Inbetween Everything’ and ‘Don’t Get Hung Up’, with brooding basslines and thick swells of sound that create a fog of sound that hovers in the room. Final track ‘No Tomorrow’ sees the album out with a pained and desperate sense of anguish – bluesy guitar lines developing into a mantra of noise that ends up exploding into itself.

Despite the heavy-handed gimmick of having vinyl noise and the sound of a turntable turning itself off grafted onto the end of the album – not really necessary, to be honest – this album shows the Davidians to be a band that are at ease with some obvious influences, and totally capable of lining up as equals with those influences.

The Stevenson Ranch Davidians

You may not realise this, but at the heart of diskant is a pop-loving indie kid, who hasn’t yet shaken off their fascination with the glossy sheen of Girls Aloud, the ramshackle sweetness of Sha La La flexidiscs or the confident jangle of Spector’s girl groups.

So while I know that The Revelations, on the basis of this five track album sampler, sound utterly contrived, totally manufactured and relentlessly bouncy, the songs here still twang at some long-forgotten heartstring. I know that ‘You’re the loser’ is one step removed from B*Witched, dammit. I know that ‘Don’t let him go’ is the musical cousin of Madonna’s ‘True blue’. But in the moment of listening to the songs, I really don’t care.

Naturally, in more pretentious company I’d never let on that I’ve listened to this CD five times today. Cynicism being the worldbeating force it is these days, I’d scoff with everybody else at the simplicity of a Ronettes/Bangles template twisted into modern bubblegum with some shiny recording skill. Maybe I’m having a day of relenting, but at the moment, this music does something basic and life-affirming for me.

Even up against the current vogue for the likes of the Long Blondes and the Pipettes, this sounds lightweight. It’s nothing special; the songs are cliched and predictable; the performances utterly free of chaos and dirt. And maybe that’s the point. Maybe there’s enough white noise and black-hearted moodiness out there, and The Revelations are existing in their own space and time, and in doing so showing more spirit and individuality than they’ll ever realise.

The Revelations

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

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

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

‘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

I breathed a slight breath of disappointment to myself upon hearing the all-too-familiar uptight-cymbal-and-bass introduction to the first track on Songs From The Lodge. Here comes another in the seemingly endless production line of Hot New Bands with their stylistic feet plonked squarely in the new wave cliches of the ’80s, I muttered to myself, like the grouchy killjoy that I doubtlessly am.

Well, maybe I need to stop judging albums on their first opening seconds quite so much, as whilst New Rhodes owe something of a debt to the mini-epics of Echo and The Bunnymen and their ilk, they certainly give it enough of their own personality and lightness to stand them in fine stead. Their twinkling guitar melodies and tightly-controlled, complex-of-bassline songs certainly remind of such fine bands as McCarthy or even The Smiths, but the twelve songs here ooze charm, excitement and a cynicism-free sense of joy that’s lost in the music of many of their recent contemporaries.

I think that there are two reasons that New Rhodes can’t help but connect. Firstly, the vocals are delivered with such a fine sense of diction and poise, as they athletically wander across an impressive range, each line ending with a vibrato wiggle, often backed up with Ronettes-gone-city-centre backing harmonies. Secondly, the songs are so damned perky, with high-speed, bright guitar thrum tying itself up with nifty melodies into clean structures that don’t stay beyond their welcome.

I realise all of a sudden that New Rhodes take me back to the heady independent pop days of yore, simultaneously sounding naive and confident and betraying a love of performance and purity that hasn’t yet been marketed or produced out of existence. I was all set to dissect this album with reason and cynicism, but as the album went by I found it impossible to find it in myself to do so.

New Rhodes
Salty Cat Records