I only became a fan of Saint Etienne gradually, joining their fan base late, via the side entrance. Over the years though, the London three piece has become one of my favourite bands, putting out many of my all time favourite indie dance songs. And now, after a tour next year, the band is quitting. They end on a high note though, for I really enjoyed their last album, of which The Last Time is a very fitting closing song. “Now I′m really glad we made the trip // Because only three survived”. Thank you for all the awesome music.

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There is a lot of good power pop coming out of the United States these days: Joe Cusumaro, Strange Passage and now Samuel S.C. A five piece from Virginia, just outside the country’s capital. Like so many bands in the genre it’s really about a few songs that really stand out for me. But that wasn’t a problem when I fell in love with Magnapop’s Merry decades ago (this reminds me a lot of that) and isn’t a problem on this very catchy Evergreen (from a split single with Florida’s POHGOH) either.

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The YouTube link is to a live version.

Ever since I mentioned Dead Moon the other day I’ve had Until it Rains in my head. My favourite song of the Portland three-piece and also the only one I actually remember. When I discovered the garage rock band through Dutch radio in the mid 1990s the fun fact about them was that the two singers were grandparents – which was extremely rare in an era when musicians in their 50s were ancient. Three decades on and Dead Moon is two-thirds dead (only Toody Cole is still alive and making music) but lives on in my head through this great song.

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Zea, once a five-piece indie rock band from the Netherlands, buried indie rock years ago and for almost two decades has been the experimental solo project of Arnold de Boer, now also the singer of equally experimental punk band The Ex. On most songs on Zea’s latest album, Arnold is joined by the marching band of his home village, who on this song in particular provide a rhythm-heavy background to Arnold singing some kind of ballad in his native Frisian — a minority language from the north of the country. It works really, really well.

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Twee pop legends Heavenly are playing shows again, and they’ll even release a new album, their first in three decades. But before Heavenly there was Talulah Gosh, with largely the same line-up, who recorded some of the earliest – and best – twee pop songs. Of which I Can’t Get No Satisfaction (Thank God) is one of my favourites. The feminist anthem certainly has the best title. “Some of my best friends are bastards like you / At least they’re not neurotics too”.

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A school friend who knew more about music than I did once taught me that punk was music that sounded like they were tearing things down. Well, about Olivia’s World he was wrong. For this Sydney, Australia band’s music is very much punk yet also sounds a lot of fun: like a party, or, at worst, getting slightly drunk to forget about a recent break-up. And then remind yourself of the good things in the world. Such as this song.

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Indie folk is a genre that, a few songs at a time, doesn’t easily get boring. I’m not exactly a connoisseur, but Oregon’s Haley Henderickx is a big name and here she is joined by Max García Conover, a Woody Guthrie inspired singer-songwriter from Maine (add Vashti Bunyan as a reference for Henderickx). Apparently, they recorded the songs for their collaboration straight to tape in a barn. I was a Mountain Goats fan in the 1990s, so I like the sound of that, and combined with the two vocals, in this Boars makes a pretty great song.

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I mentally file Sharp Pins somewhere between Elephant 6 and Guided By Voices – the voice of the band’s sole member Kai Slater reminds me of that of Robert Pollard. That’s the What does it sound like? question out of the way. I was a bit surprised that K Records released this, as it seems a little too ‘rock’ for the Olympia, WA label. But then, Sharp Pins does make some really fine songs, such as this Queens of Globes and Mirros.

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Soldiers Who Want to Be Heroes by singer-songwriter-poet Rod McKuen is probably the only song I still like that I discovered through my parents; a 7” single of it was among their pretty small (and very odd) collection. I loved this song as a kid, for even as a nine-year-old who could only speak a few words of English, I understood its anti-war message. Almost forty years later and a decade after McKuen’s passing I still like the song – and still think war is a pretty terrible idea.

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Seventeen Years Old And Berlin Wall (or 17歳とベルリンの壁, which I found helps finding them on streaming platforms) is one of the oddest band names – even for Japan, I feel obliged to add, the country that brought us Cruyff in the Bedroom. That also happens to be a good reference for this band’s music, except Seventeen etc adds a few extra layers of shoegaze – so many that it becomes almost impossible to see one’s own shoes. Kinda like Hartfield then, or some early Rocketship, if you want a non-Japanese reference. Oh, and like those bands, it is really good.

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“I was scared / It was too much fun”. Hey, that’s me. Also me: the slightly awkward but happy way Lightheaded singer and guitar player Stephen was dancing to their own songs when I saw the band play live in Paris earlier this year. And also me: the music of Lightheaded and this song in particular, which reminds me of The Aislers Set (Alicia Vanden Heuvel of said band co-produced the album). It “makes my heart skip, shimmer, and stop”.

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Linking a band to its location is always a bit cheap, but Sweet Nobody’s Revenge does remind me of that time in the Summer of 2019 as I was driven along the beach near Los Angeles. (See, that’s why it’s cheap: that was in Venice and the band is further south, from Long Beach.) But this is happy indiepop that, especially with that jangly keyboard, fits well on any warm beach. Or on any blog about happy pop songs, such as this one.

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Late July 2019, after a really shitty year, I was in New York and found shelter from a bad rain storm in a local Starbucks, where the sound system played Rebirth of Slick. That seemed fitting: the jazzy hip hop from Digable Planets, and this 1992 song in particular, is the music I most identify with New York. Also, it is perhaps my favourite hip hop song ever. And suddenly I thought: hey, no matter how shitty things are, I am here in New York. I am Cool Like Dat.

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The Bandcamp song linked and embedded above is a really great live recording from 2016 The 1992 studio version, to which the other links go, isn’t available on Bandcamp.

I’ve read surprisingly little about Morgan and the Organ Donors given that it features Tobi Vail of Bikini Kill on drums. But then the band sounds less riot grrrl and more Pacific North West garage punk (think Dead Moon) and that’s a genre that almost by design doesn’t appear above the ground. This song, from their 2023 debut, is my favourite, for its catchy combination of slightly mean vocals and a background choir.

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The other founding member of The Field Mice, Bobby Wratten, went on to form a few other bands, the latest of which is Lightning in a Twilight Hour. They have been around for quite a while now, but I was busy doing other things, so their new album Colours Yet To Be Named is my introduction to their music. Which is still growing on me, but I immediately fell in love with the very Field Mice-y Folk Radio. And that was before I learned that the singer here is none other than fellow Field Mouse Anne Mari Davis.

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There’s a video of Pearl Jam with half of Crowded House at a music festival in New Zealand playing Not Given Lightly, a song by Chris Knox (also of Tall Dwarfs). Everyone at the festival, except Eddie Vedder, appears to know the song, which always impressed me as I thought of it as pretty obscure. Not in Knox’s native New Zealand then. Chris suffered a stroke years ago (which makes the album title of Seizure somewhat… interesting) but is still around and now someone wrote a book about him, named after this song (which, incidentally, made our wedding playlist).

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The artsy electronic pop from Smerz – a Norwegian duo, residing in the slightly more hipper Denmark – reminds me a bit of Chicks on Speed, except slightly more dreamy and less in your face. This includes the use of rap here on Feisty, which just happens to fit the song well. And that is what I like about Smerz: this isn’t art for art’s sake, or experimentation for experimentation’s sake, but it feels like they played around until they end up with some really fun pop songs.

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London’s High Vis knows how to make hardcore punk – not a genre known for innovation or surprise – interesting. In Mind’s A Lie, aggressive punk is sung to the background of what sounds like an eastern indie dance song. The contrast works really well. Given my enthousiasm for this song I was a bit disappointed by the rest of the album, but this is a song blog, so who cares anyway. It is cool enough that there is a loud, aggressive song I am excited about.

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“All eyes fixed on the doorway / Some day, something good will come this way”. This feels like my experience of being a die-hard Cannanes fan for more than a quarter of a century until I finally got to see the Australian band play live twice this spring. And then I got to hang out with Frances and Stephen after the shows too. What more does a fan want? They didn’t play Vivienne, my favourite song of theirs, but they played many other great songs and those two nights in Athens and Paris are among my happiest as a music fan.

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It seems that Amelia and Rob of Heavenly et al have a hand in at least half the new indiepop that comes out. Usually through their Skep Wax label, but on European Sun they play music too. The main character in European Sun is Steve Miles though, a singer songwriter made from the same mould that also produced Billy Bragg. This is especially true on When Britain Was Great, a very timely tongue-in-cheek ‘ode’ to Britain’s bigoted past. “I remember so proudly those heavenly years / In a miserable, murky, misogynist land”.

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