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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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”.
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.
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.
Bandcamp | Tidal | Spotify | YouTube
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
“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.
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”.
Shatta is a variant of dancehall originating in the French-speaking Caribbean, that is more bass-heavy and with vocals that are more robotic. It has gained popularity in the French-speaking world (the genre thus far only has a Wikipedia article in French) and Maureen, apparently, is the Queen of the genre (that is a nod to her recent album). This song, with its intro borrowed from Für Elise, is a favourite of mine, with all the ingredients (multiple languages, multiple rappers) I previously argued for.
There are many things wrong with the world today, but from books to music, there is a lot more attention to things from beyond the anglophone world than 20 years ago and that is a good thing. It has led to garage indie punk quartet Alvilda – four women from Paris who sing in French – do a US Tour this year. Which is awesome, for not only does Alvilda play really catchy tunes, French with its many é and u sounds, works really well for this kind of music. But then, we kind of knew that ever since Plastic Bertrand.
When Lush was around in the 1990s, I was only vaguely aware of the band; I might have mentally filed them under ‘Britpop’. It took me decades to fully appreciate them as one of the best bands to come out of Britain in that era. Which is awfully long, given that they played a poppy kind of shoegaze and had not one but two female vocalists. That objectively doesn’t matter, but is the kind of thing I love, and this is my blog. Downer is from their 1990 debut album Gala, which label 4AD recently reissued in a remastered version.
I remember seeing Guided by Voices live in 1995 and being quite disappointed: they played rock songs, not those fragile lo-fi songs I liked so much. Also, the members were approaching 40, which felt ancient. The band members are a whole lot older now, but then I am much older now than they were back in 1995. They still make music and now sound more rock on record too. But they still put out the occasional pretty pop song, such as this Phantasmagoric Upstarts, from their latest album Thick Rich and Delicious.
I was there when in December 2002 the Television Personalities made its comeback, after singer Dan Treacy had spent some time in prison. The mini festival in London where they played turned out to be quite pivotal for my life, though not because of the band. About whom there are a lot of things to say, but they did write some of the finest late punk/early indiepop songs, such as this Geoffrey Ingram. This song is for Andreas, whose smile that weekend I can still remember and who, I learned, passed away early this month.
There’s some kind of About page at the bottom of the first post. There is an Instagram account and also a Bluesky account and a playlist on Tidal. I am Martijn and this is my personal-professional website.