Song reviews

Walking right down the middle of the mainstream rock road are Finnish band Burntfield. Manly guitars from Ville Repo ensure that there is more than enough testosterone flowing through “Change My Ways” to ensure your appetite for rocking loud music (and concurrent consumption of cold beer) is satisfied.

Here we go again.  “The World Is Over” proves to be little more than an exercise in maudlin laptop powered musical masturbation for London producer Post-Ape. Apparently he played all the instruments on this dull song himself and it isn’t hard to work out which one he played with the most.

The past is again the future and SybiAnn prove it with “Cosmic Favella”, their resoundingly retro electro assault on the better class of European dance floor. As you might expect of something so heavily sequenced, this song is hypnotic in the after dark urban combat environment.

The sequenced brutality and alienated vocals of “Mae Pawb Yn Haeddu Glaw Yn Waeth Na Fi” once again shows that Y Pencadlys is as much of the electro-fied dance floor as he is of dull grey streets of a Welsh housing estate. One day he may indeed be legend.

I would be inclined to call Weather Music’s “Incredible” old fashioned but you might perceive that as some sort of insult and that would be an injustice. Instead the jury finds the case proven for this song being an uplifting, and carefully constructed, pop song that soars off down the highway of life with Susanne Trolleberg’s seventies style rock solid vocal giving it all the direction it could need.

“Give Me Arms”, by London boy/girl duo The Honey Ants, is so light that it could float upon the waters of life and so cute that it could readily be converted into a teddy bear. That makes the winsome acoustic charm of this song something of an oddity in these overt days.

Vivid Dreamscapes have included all the usual stuff that you would expect of white boy hip hop in this song.  “Black Dogs Interlude” therefore has a soundbite or two to decorate the looped ambience, a metronomic monotonic Eminem style rap and - as you might have surmised by now - not a lot of originality.

A mean and moody take on the cascading indie guitar sound lifts “Sleep Spindles” skywards and Lëura – she is Australian, by the way – emotes like she has absorbed all of the world’s post punk angst. If you like to look deep down inside then this song will work for you.

Despite the sterling vocal efforts of Liv Armon, she fails to inject life into “Fake It All” making the song just another slice of uninspired, and unskilled, indie rock cake. You’ve heard it all before and no doubt you will hear it all again so, basically, the Ms Armon needs a new band who have some imagination and she might get somewhere.

Too contrived, repetitive and plastic to actually convince, “Dance, Dance, Dance” goes nowhere fast for Christian & The 2120's which is a bit of a disappointment really but, then again, I suppose it is unreasonable to expect every band from Sweden to be good

“Chwyldro” is another hypnotic release from Gwenno as she takes the Welsh language and makes it all fluffy over the foundation of a solidly sequenced hybrid of urban alienation and low end dance floors. That said, the song does makes more sense on headphones than reverberating around the room suggesting intimacy was the aim rather than post midnight domination and if Gwenno were French rather than Welsh then she would surely be one of their national treasures by now

It would appear that Static Brains are a young hard rock band from Finland although their youth is not apparent in the beer drinking rifftastic roughness that propels “Bastards and Born Again” along like a runaway train. An honest band that knows how to keep out the cold methinks.