Clearance: Dixie Motel Two-Step

Clearance have trapped an essence of US college rock – the strident, charismatic, poetically noisy one that starred Pavement, Buffalo Tom, Dinosaur Jr and Archers of Loaf – and pencilled the outlines with thicker tunes.

The phrasing is straight out of Malkmus’ copybook and the guitar’s languid whip nods to J Mascis, but this is no pastiche. Like the best bands – and just from their first four songs, you know Clearance have got something special, an essence of their own – they add their own magic potion to the mix.

They’ve self-released a 7” ep, Dixie Motel Two-Step. Do yourself a favour and buy it.

The songs of Grant McLennan

I’m going to pretend I live in a world where Grant McLennan isn’t famous and try to describe his songs to you.

Grant McLennan wrote pop songs like Going Blind and Easy Come Easy Go that, if you were to hear them on daytime radio, would sound right next to I Want To Hold Your Hand and 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover and Morning Train (Nine to Five).

You’d hear them on the radio as you got ready for work or when you were driving to escape the city. They would never sound old. If you didn't hear his pop songs for a few months, the next time you did they’d sound as fresh and bright and jubilant as church bells ringing on Liberation Day.

If I had to describe to you what people mean when they write about love, I’d point you to side 2 of Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express. In particular, I’d play you the songs that bookend that peerless run of songs: In The Core Of A Flame and Apology Accepted.

You’d start by feeling the rush of lust and desire that is passion’s full fire: “If the devil had seen your dress/He would've changed his name/Put down his fork and moved up above/Why burn in hell when you burn for love?” And then you’d learn what love really means by measuring the weight of its loss in Apology Accepted. Better songs may have been written, but when I'm listening to the uncompromising emotion of Apology Accepted I can’t call any of them to mind.

And if someone ever told me that they understood all of mankind’s ways, that they had decoded human intelligence and knew the limits of our ingenuity, then I would sit them in St Paul’s Cathedral in London and play them Cattle and Cane.

I live in a world where Grant McLennan is dead but his songs are alive. Three of my friends are playing his songs live on Sunday. We will be reminded, again, what fantastic songs they are and hear them anew.

Before then, let's listen to Easy Come Easy Go from the Botany sessions, recorded in Grant's home, October 1989.

Souvenir Stand

Now this is good. Good like Barry and Greenwich, good like Gainsbourg's breathy noir, good like The Beach Boys when they sing about girls and cars and hanging out, and good like any number of those tear-stained 60s girl group smashes (melancholy, melodrama and melody in under three minutes; I'm thinking right now of It Hurts To Be Sixteen by Barbara Chandler - pick your own, I bet it'll slug you in the guts just the same).

Souvenir Stand, or Stephanie Cupo from New Jersey, is musical soulmates with Gigi's Maintenant (still the go-to record for contemporary string-swept, rain-soaked heartache), and The School's lipgloss-pop.

If Stuart Murdoch's soundtrack for God Help The Girl had featured songs this good, I'd have donated. Because Souvenir Stand sound like a million bucks.

Scott Miller

Scott Miller died this week. He made many brilliant records, first with Game Theory and then with The Loud Family. Those 1980s Game Theory albums did everything REM's did, only better and with more bite.

Miller thought that "it was essential to hold on to this mid-sixties way of talking about a particular girl with a particular mysterious complexity the way Bob Dylan would, or something" (you should listen to Crash Into June).


Miller had a degree in electrical engineering and used analogue synths and electric drums to complement the jangling, literate romance of his guitar. Game Theory's songs had the conviction that combining Big Star's power pop with The Three O'Clock's paisley underground would define the 80s more accurately than Madonna (you should listen to Penny Things Won't).


Somehow - the usual reasons, you know what they are - neither Game Theory nor The Loud Family broke through. Though there was some attention in the US, they were almost entirely ignored in the UK. In the late 1990s, the band Beulah stayed over at my place after a gig. I put on a Game Theory album - The Big Shot Chronicles, since you ask - and they were elated.

Miller was a near-neighbour of theirs in California. They said he'd be delighted that someone in the UK was a massive fan. I got an email a month later telling me that he was indeed pleased that he was known and well-loved by at least someone. I thought it bittersweet that he wasn't known by tens of thousands. He should've been.

In a 1985 interview, Miller revealed his modesty, realism and pure pop heart:

"We have none of the mysterious appeal of a band like Husker Du, who have overtones of real violence and just confront the world's most heinous problems head on. Or bands like The Cramps that have this kind of ghoulish quality - there's nothing really impressive about any mystique that I have. I'm just...it's just pop. And that's kind of hard to sell sometimes."

Here, read that interview in full:

Georgiana Starlington: Paper Moon

So this is what Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan would sound like stripped of their studio budget and sent to a shack outside of Nashville with a reel-to-reel tape recorder and Ry Cooder for company. It's dusty and road worn and it aches. There's something of Mazzy Star's ghostly atmosphere in here, too, only this feels more real.

Georgiana Starlington is Jack and Julie Hines moonlighting from their rock band K-Holes. For my money, Georgiana Starlington is where they should go full time. You'll have to flick through a lot of records in the racks to come by one that sustains a spectral presence so captivating as Paper Moon, for one. For two, it's not like Nancy and Lee can make a new album.

In an ideal world, Lee Hazelwood would still be making records and they'd be as good as this. I'm not going to be greedy and ask for another Georgiana Starlington album right now, because I'm certain this one will reveal new layers over many months' listening. There's even a 'hidden track' on the vinyl. It's called I'm Coming Down. You get the picture

Dick Diver - Calendar Days

Dick Diver occupy the mid-spot between fellow Melburnians Lower Plenty's downbeat, countrified melancholy and Boomgates' suburban pop anthems.

There's common musical ground between all these bands (if you love one, you'll love the other) and in Dick Diver there's also something of The Triffids' bleak Raining Pleasure and The Tender Engines' domestic vignettes. Essentially, they've played Spring Hill Fair a lot more than other Go-Betweens albums.

There's common ground, too, between Dick Diver and Boomgates in Steph Hughes, who owns every song she sings in those bands. She reminds me of Tracey Thorn's deadpan romance and Emma Kupa's keening cry. Calendar Days isn't any kind of departure from debut album New Start Again, but it is even more quietly confident and that little bit better at making the ordinary sound extraordinary.

Rainbow Gun Show - Cinderella Sizzle

Distorted pop like PiL's Death Disco or like Crocodiles if they channelled glam-rock instead of Suicide, Cinderella Sizzle is stuffed full of deranged synths and a nagging, raging guitar riff. Of course there are handclaps. They're from Chicago. This is their first (actual vinyl) single.