Song reviews

Staying right in the middle of the road are Monday’s Monsoon yet, despite taking few musical chances during their song “Something New”, their mastery of mixing melody and melancholy makes this one distinctly listenable.

Dagny takes a style pill and lets “Closet Disco Queen” out to do its thing on the dancefloor. The loops and the retro Madonna feel are present and correct but so is a certain ironic quality that this song more than the sum of its synthetic parts,

The Howlers are back on the red meat diet and “Viper” once more takes the band on a walk down the guitar driven indie rock version of the yellow brick road. Just the thing if you crank the volume up a bit with a can of lager in your other hand,

There is strength in Mathilde Widding’s bones and that strength manifests itself on her song “Burning Pockets of Love”. Delivered with real emotional power, this song shows what she can do when she hits her groove.

Diva Duke, it says here, are from Belgium yet they sound more American than you might expect. “Again” ticks all the right rock style boxes with the guitars and the female vocals sounding convincingly energetic

Can songs sound intellectual? “Hur blev det såhär” certainly sounds intellectual and emotionally meaningful but I would suppose that is how Peter Nordberg’s usually rolls with his rather intense music.

White Birches mix the mystical and the ethereal into their song “Solace” with the result making you feel better than you when you started listening. Maybe that is something magical or maybe it is just what music can do. Either way, it works.

“Little Things” is an energetic song that starts off sounding a bit like brit pop that has been fed on red meat before a tempo shift into lower gear and a return for the high speed big finish establishes Canned Pineapple’s artistic credibility.

Straight down the line rock from Liger with the band adding enough in the way of overwrought lyrics and muscular metallic guitar riffs to give their song “Throne” a fair amount of stadium filling musical credibility.

Wistful female vocals keep Remington Super 60 on the right track and their song “Time To Breathe” duly, and almost casually, evokes thoughts of trippier times over that hypnotic bass line. I might even call this one spiritually uplifting.

There are times when I think that Conscious Pilot want to be a brit pop revival band as their post punk angularity is too often tempered with a regard for melody for coincidence. “Face Down” duly hits that mark again.

in that peculiarly British fashion Hannah Scott sounds distinctly wholesome and naturalistic on “Sitting In The Dark” yet her socio-realistic lyrics highlight that she has a point that needs to be made. A protest song for today, perhaps?