Song reviews

Even in the sunshine that blesses Australia downbeat electropop survives with “Release Me To The Sea” allowing singer Jessica Evans the opportunity to overdose on dramatic melancholy. The hipsters here and out there will like this one.

If you like your Australian bands big on volume and low on subtlety then High Tropics might just be your thing with just enough of the indie ghost haunting “15 Years” to make you wish for summer.

As always a fine example of how to do big city power pop, Anya Marina fingersnaps her way through her song “Cut You Loose” with all the poise and emotional precision that your heart and ears need.

Funny how a name bring backs memories for Pangea was also – a coincidence I’m sure – an Indian restaurant that sold me a curry of doom. You know what I mean… however, Liverpool band Pangea are a rather more uplifting proposition with their song “Something Bad” echoing better times for all its three minutes and ten seconds.

There are times when you get to thinking that all Edinburgh bands are unadventurous to the point of self-parody then along comes one like Miracle Glass Company with an offbeat and appealing seventies style pop confection called “T.R.O.U.B.L.E.” and I am, once more, dancing in the street.

Once more in the retro-electro groove, Lines stamp their sequenced feet to the beat of their song “Weekend” as if time has stood still. That said, there’s enough in the chorus to get you in the groove too.

One might say that Blonder's song “In and Out” is the work of a mind with his finger on the pulse of modern music yet the energy in his voice suggest that he may be a lot less cynical than he makes himself out to be.

Distinctly hypnotic in the way that afro-beat is, Amadou & Mariam nevertheless stamp some class on to their song “Boufou Safou” with the curiously familiar riff driving the song back on to the dancefloor for one more spin.

Not quite the sound of revolution, Tokyo keep it simple and familiar all the way through “Like What I Like” and will therefore undoubtedly achieve just what they deserve to achieve.

When it comes to setting the mood, Softspot hits the - ahem – spot with “Habits”. Cue Sarah Kinlaw’s wistful voice drifting over the kind of minimalist song that cries out for recognition by the intelligentsia.

It seems the done thing for country singers from this side of the pond to go to Nashville and do their recording thing with Norway’s Hege Oversveen doing just that and the end result – her song “Get The Fuck Out” – chases Miranda Lambert in the telling it like it is department.

“Only You” appears, on first acquaintance, to be another example of lo-fi electronica but They Called Him Zone manage to inject a dream like space in to what is usually obsessional claustrophobia.