Small Factory

Can we talk about Small Factory? About one of the very best singles bands of the early 90s? Their records are joyously frantic. They're electric-acoustic and frenzied like The Clean, even though they'd never heard The Clean. They're about love, because that was what mattered most.



There was a flexi in 1991 with Honeybunch and The Bachelor Pad because they kept good company. The next year they came to the UK and toured with Heavenly. A few days after their London gig I sat on a bus for 5-and-a-half hours so I could see them again. The day after that I got another bus to see them again. They were that good live.

Milky Way fanzine

A year later, their album I Do Not Love You didn't cut it for me. No matter. They were a perfect singles band. The only other band whose singles I played as much back then was Velocity Girl. I moved on from them, too. That's pop music. You fall in love, then your head gets turned by something newer and shinier. You move on. Eventually you come back.

Small Factory came up, accidentally, in late 1997. Jeffrey Borchardt of the Honeybunch played a low-key London gig on his honeymoon. I asked him to play Hey Blue Sky! He declined because that was about someone else and he was with his new wife. I later found out that Blue Sky is Phoebe Summersquash of Small Factory.

I came back to Small Factory this week because a Record Collector review of the brilliant new Trick Mammoth single compares them to Small Factory. Can't hear the connection, but I can hear the brilliance.

Norma and the Heartaches

Hot Pants (Gonna Get You In Trouble) is the finest in Philly funk. It's both good-time party crossover soul and cautionary tale. Music seldom gets more infectious and fun than this.

I think Hot Pants was 1971. You can get the reissue (an exact 45 repro) easily. Here's the b-side, Hot Pants Dance, from my scratchy original (you'll want your own copy, not least for the amazing vocal version).



Now you can get another Norma and the Heartaches 7", Nice and Slow:



Almost inevitably, the label describes it as 'more obscure and superior'. I'll disagree about the superior bit, but it's some record nonetheless.

I really urge you to go to Funkadelphia, my favourite boutique soul reissue label the past decade, and buy The Philly Sound You Never Heard - Philly Soul Girls Volume Two, which features Hot Pants, and pick up some other albums while you're there.

Web of Sunsets: Room of Monsters

These 9 songs have an eerie, glassy brilliance. There's an incorporeal atmosphere like Mazzy Star, a downhome twang like Scud Mountain Boys and a soft psychedelia like the sound of California, 1967. They call it "acid-country", which reminds me of Judee Sill describing her music as "country-cult-baroque".

It's no surprise this album was recorded in a day - the cumulative effect is a sustained reverie. There's no knockout pop song like Fool's Melodies, their first single and one of 2013's stand-out debuts, which is no bad thing because you're meant to take Room of Monsters whole in its intricate pattern of tender and uncompromising glory.

Eyelids - Seagulls Into Submission

Fuck yeah! What a riff, what a noise - guitars played with dirt under the fingernails and a sweet tune in all that noise. You could probably sing along (Dinosaur Jr's version of) Just Like Heaven to this, and there's a helping of the Rain Parade's What's She Done To Your Mind. So what? It reminds me of great songs because it's a great song.

The Hundredth Anniversary - Wreckers

These are good times for fans of enigmatic female vocals and delirious guitar pop: Fear of Men, Flowers, Heaven's Gate, Little Big League and Butter The Children.

This very welcome trend, to which The Hundredth Anniversary's new EP is the latest addition, owes something to MBV's disembodied vocals over gales of feedback and something else to The Sundays' spectral atmosphere.

Wreckers is 5 tracks of strange wonder. It had me reaching for The Catchers' Mute again after far too long and that, as anyone who knows it, is recommendation indeed.

Only 100 copies of these so don't sleep.

Withered Hand: New Gods

What record has given me greater pleasure in the last 5 years than Withered Hand's Good News? Or in the last 10 years? Drawing on James Yorkston's Moving Up Country - the very heartbeat of the new Scottish folk tradition - and the sparkling eloquence of the Silver Jews' American Water it marked the arrival of a great musical and lyrical talent in Dan Willson.

Where Good News corrupted the Good News Bible with a teenager's spirit and a comic's wit - the anti-masturbation campaigner John Harvey Kellogg on Cornflake; atheistic, sexual rebellion on Religious Songs - from the background of growing up as a Jehovah's Witness, this collection elevates musical heroes as the New Gods.

Those musical New Gods are referenced, or worshipped - King Creosote on King Of Hollywood, the US indie underground on Black Tambourine - by Willson with a full band. So if you can also hear Pavement's Major Leagues on Fall Apart or Galaxie 500's half-lit melodic tricks on Between True Love and Ruin, then they too are the new gods.

But this isn't a record of reference points. How would you explain the zen-like perfection of Horseshoe? It sounds like one of those songs that's always existed. Perhaps in the future it'll never not be playing on an oldies radio station somewhere in the world.

Nor is this a record divorced from its predecessor. Love In The Time Of Ecstasy is namechecked in Love Over Desire and the precisely poised pathos of early 70s Neil Young, which helped define Good News, is carried over to New Gods' ballads.

It's easy to see New Gods selling 10-15,000 copies. The production by Tony Doogan, who worked on Belle and Sebastian's early albums, adds a fresh luminosity that could help transfer these songs, as happened to Belle and Sebastian, to a more mainstream audience.

It's early days, but New Gods sounds like the very best record to come my way in a long time.

Terror of the Deep: Death of the Gideon

A new New Zealand band not from Dunedin, Wellington’s Terror of the Deep have some of that Dunedin sound - The Chills on Times of Uncertainty; David Kilgour’s knack of making intimate songs anthemic - but their eyes stretch beyond their shores.

Yes, Fallen Down Tree does have something of The Cure’s Head On The Door about it, but elsewhere there are suggestions of what REM’s later work might have sounded like if they’d written it as young men. And there’s a wayward backwoods folk thing going on, quite possibly the influence of ingesting something a little more potent than Speight’s lager.

This ep is Terror of the Deep’s first vinyl release. It’s great.

Out this week, only available at Selection for now.