New music releases

We've had a two week holiday from reviewing singles, with the intention of giving our jaded ears a much needed rest from the constant clamour of singers and bands wanting attention and recognition. When will they ever stop?

Easing our way back in gently, let's start with Smoke Fairies 'Living With Ghosts'. Two former school friends from Sussex who've returned from travelling round the States, possessed with the spirit of old time American music. The girls are Bob Dylan's dream, what the Robert Plant and Alison Krauss album should've sounded like (if it weren't a bit boring), and certain to be praised to the high heavens by the type of music magazines that still use too many words to describe records no one bought at the time. We like them a lot.

Attracted by the hand-stitched sleeve and lyric insert, Nathalie Nahai 'Overboard' would also seem like our sort of thing. Certainly the happy/sad downward progressing chords, warm pedal steel and muted banjo are welcome. We're not sure Nathalie's voice is quite distinctive enough to stand out in what is quite a crowded lady-singer-songwriter market, at present. But if we were on a musical lifeboat that was taking on water, we'd think twice before chucking her overboard. You can't say fairer than that.

Staying with the female persuasion, Poppy & The Jezebels 'UFO' not only has youth on its side but an understanding of what makes for great pop music that belies the Birmingham four piece's age. Listing Adam and the Ants, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and the Spice Girls among their influences, they've not only named our favourite bands of all time but positioned themselves perfectly to be our new favourite, since UFO sounds like it could've been made any time in the last 30 years, yet sounds like nothing we've heard all year. An exhilarating, plinky-plonky rush of hope. We don't want to listen to anything else now.

4Music Road To V winners Bombay Bicycle Club infuriated many (not least us) by deciding to ignore the fact they were about to be the next big thing and go back to school to do their exams. Whatever happened to rock 'n' roll? Evening/Morning is the first post-revision single and it's a confident stride forward; a little bit Wire, a little bit Sonic Youth. But it's b-side 'You Already Know' that excites us most, with a glimpse of a potential future for Bombay Bicycle Club as fine purveyors of delicate psych folk. That is once they've had a gap year and been to university. Sigh.

Beginning with a pounding 'Black Is Back' drumbeat, Das Pop 'Underground' could be Prefab Sprout at their bounciest, or Elvis Costello & the Attractions at their most urgent. With such unbridled pop naïveté, we assumed this was the Belgian band's debut single but they're actually three albums into their career. The new album is apparently called 'F**kland', which kind of puts us off a bit, but the single is terrific.

Having ignored Noah And The Whale for a while, mainly because of their terrible name, they seem to be just about everywhere at the moment. But listening to '5 Years Time' we knew there was another reason we'd shunned them and it's this: they are f**king obnoxious. The kind of soulless, faux-twee, novelty-indie shite that's tailor made for the soundtrack of indie movies about similarly obnoxious kids doing it with each other and making mixtapes. Ugh. Take it away.

If there's one song that completely justifies the continued existence of forever-bridesmaids The Futureheads, it's 'Walking Backwards'. Enormous, relentless, ambitious and clear-sighted. In fact, they should split up now. Go out on a high. They won't though, will they?

And some bands never know when to quit - even after they've quit. Failing to realise they had a career based on two songs that people liked, The Verve have reformed. 'Love Is Noise' begins with a preposterous sound, akin to several cuckoos, a seagull and a jackdaw all shouting "hello" down a megaphone. It then does its best to sound like an Echo & The Bunnymen album track (one of the later ones when they'd lost it a bit) or even The Mission (when they tired to go pop). It's mostly bluster and over-egged production, trying to disguise the pomposity of a meaningless song. Welcome back.


» Reviewed by: Tim
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