Then there’s the whole familiarity thing. All it took was a random listen to some eighties style electro pop from a Glasgow band, apparently revelling in anonymity, called Flash Talk and the light bulb of recognition lit right up. Could this be the ghost of the long lost brothers that were Sonny Marvello resurrected, Tardis style, as a pastiche of the time of the last great pop song?
The evidence is there as no less than three Sonny Marvello songs – “Tiny Little Sparks”, “Fire Went Out” and “We’re All Cruel” – find a place in the track listing. That’s proof enough for me and even the robotic beat underpinning the rest of the songs cannot detract from the simple fact that the power pop mine is clearly back in production with treasures like “Land of the Lost Cause” and “Sparks To Fire” justifying their electrically powered journey up to the surface and, while this might well be a retro sound, it is also a sound that will find many friends in Europe and Scandinavia where songs in that style have unwavering popularity.
None of that would matter, of course, if the songs on this album could not scale up to festival size and, with nothing twee or fey to slow them down, Flash Talk walk right up to the counter and go large every time. There’s even a big ballad going by the name of “Whispering Song” that will make you wish for the return of FM radio for this is passion like they used to have back when Gil Gerard was Buck Rogers.
The album is available for download from Bandcamp.