Lunchbox - After School Special

This is just pop music. Sure, the time might be right for protest songs, for bands to confront social problems rather than personal issues. But one of pop music's main functions is as distraction from the everyday, as reminders of a better world, of hope and of personal celebration. Lunchbox make pop songs - really good pop songs - and they're a very welcome distraction.

After School Special is a record where it never rains in southern California. It's an immediate sugar rush like The Archies. It's got dancefloor snap like The Go! Team. It's full of punchy horns and jangly guitars like The Housemartins.

Lunchbox break absolutely no new ground here. That's the whole point. There's no great profundity - it's just pop music with all the attendant colour, glamour and magic. It's enormous fun. And sometimes that's what we need.

deathcrash ‎– People thought my windows were stars

deathcrash's eternal songs sound like they've been buried for thousands of years and uncovered in an ancient rite, like wholly intact extinct animals revealed in Siberia's melting permafrost, and given an afterlife on vinyl.

Where last year's Slumber single was granted its powers by Arab Strap's Girls Of Summer, this latest record was brought to life by studying Slint's Spiderland. One side of the 12" ep is songs for m, i-iv (deathcrash aren't big on capital letters), a post-rock suite in four parts, each roughly lasting a light year, taking as long as it does for new galaxies to emerge.

Black Country, New Road are - rightly - getting a lot of attention, but they're going to have to share the post-rock limelight with deathcrash who are quietly excellent. And don't have a saxophone player or threaten free-jazz improv.

Wicketkeeper - Shonk

Archers of Loaf were peddling a single on Record Store Day this year. Good stuff, but £15 for one new original song was too rich for my blood. Your entertainment pound gets much more value for money from Wicketkeeper’s album, Shonk, which trades in similarly gritty and tense noise.

Perhaps most obviously,Wicketkeeper’s kindred spirits are Built To Spill. That early 90s underground sound that wasn’t grunge, but knew where it was coming from, like Edsel Auctioneer and first album Teenage Fanclub in the UK. Spin’s screaming guitars are a definite nod to Dinosaur Jr, and the guitar avalanche and sledgehammer bass of The Side come, brilliantly, from Husker Du’s copybook.

Sure, Shonk isn’t overly adventurous, but their controlled chaos is dynamic, consistently forceful and rhythmically interesting enough to file under ‘excellent’ and ‘catch this band live as soon as the pandemic madness ends’.

The Umbrellas - Maritime

It was always pretty easy to give C86 an identity in the 21st century because it had never had one before. C86 was the name of a compilation tape, a snapshot of a country’s underground guitar scene one season, not a shared sonic ideal. As one of the tape’s contributors, David Westlake, said, it was “a scene centred on a number of disparate bands”.

A few of those disparate bands, particularly Jim Beattie’s Primal Scream and the Razorcuts, sounded like they only bought records made by American bands from 1966 to 1968. Which is where The Umbrellas come in.

So if C86 means superior jangle, Roger McGuinn guitars and actually now you mention it pretty high production standards, then that’s what The Umbrellas are. They’re from San Francisco, a city currently punching above its weight with a ton of great bands - sort of similar, but disparate.

Perhaps historians will give 2020’s San Francisco scene a name. More likely, contemporary popkids will delight in The Umbrellas’ simultaneous discharge of jangle and harmony. And when they release an album on Slumberland next year, maybe people will draw a comparison to when Creation heard Razorcuts’ I Heard You The First Time ep on Flying Nun and signed them to record an album.

Galore

Galore play raggedy guitars to the best of their ability, panache over perfection, all raw minimalism like Beat Happening and stumbling like early Pastels with Veronica Falls romantic drama. Most obviously - most wonderfully - they sound like Rose Melberg on K, by which I mean Tiger Trap if they'd doubled the recording budget to $10 to include a producer.

It feels like there's something really special going on in San Francisco. The Umbrellas, Tony Molina, The Reds, Pinks and Purples, the Paisley Shirt roster. So Melbourne's finally got a rival. Maybe Galore know the score, which is why they got Mikey Young in to master the album.

Romero - Honey

Wow! If we’re doing singles of the year, then tear up the ballot papers, cancel the rest of 2020 and hand Romero the gong for Honey. And b-side of the year for Neapolitan.

Romero are from Melbourne but share musical DNA with two of the great one-hit wonders of the past 5 years, both Sydney bands with an art rock edge. There’s the wiry noise and breakneck pace of Point Being’s Degustation, and the angular, full Fall fury of Display Homes’s Climate Change.

Perhaps most obviously, though, Romero trade in nagging, intense verse hook melodies like The Strokes once did so irresistibly. They’re the first Australian act who look like they can go global without any nods to dolewave (they’ve got nothing in common with Courtney Barnett or Rolling Blackouts). Honestly? I’d be happy if they make more records. And if the Display Homes album, originally scheduled for January 2019, comes out.




Hat tip to Glaswegian garage rock love god Brogues for alerting me to this modern classic.

The Altons - When You Go (That's When You'll Know)

Well, this is a song that knows how to announce itself: a breathless r&b groove that slips into intense southern soul.

Excellent though that is, I’m here for the b-side, Over and Over: soul so devotional, dramatic and tragic it’s a wonder the band didn’t sign a suicide pact before the tape rolled.

It’s the pop-soul ballad done with old-fashioned simplicity that aches with elegance and ardour, and will never go out of fashion.

Penrose
Penrose is Daptone’s new subsidiary and The Altons are one of 5 acts with new 7”s kicking off the label.

Next to The Altons, the very best is Jason Joshua’s Language of Love. Joshua released possibly my favourite soul single of the last two years, Rose Gold, but his album didn’t quite cut it. He’s back on the top of his game now.

Thee Sinseers debuted on Colemine last year, but they left me cold. I’m all over Seems Like, though, their new deep soul pleading 45 on Penrose. Keep an eye on this label.