Song reviews

Eminently irritating and yet annoyingly catchy, Swedish songwriter Dandan kicks his laptop into turbo mode to both invigorate the plastic powered “Secrets” and simultaneously make it compatible with the style aspirations of every Fiat 500 owner. This song will undoubtedly be the soundtrack to an advert sometime soon.

Revolving Doors – the artists formerly known as No Fxd Abode – seem to have taken lessons from much bigger bands and developed their heartfelt indie rock sound into the kind of music that is made for festivals (and big ones at that). Chris Woods, with his customary confidence, picks up the words to “Slip Away” and throws them right to the back of the crowd.

Pleasantly redolent of San Francisco when it was on the cusp of brotherly love and oblivion, Illinois’ Whitewolfsonicprincess roll an organ powered smoke it up joint with “Sad Eyed Prophet”. The female vocals seem almost too serious for the laidback groove but, as they say, the guitar gently weeps anyway.

In every big city there are bedrooms with laptops, and In Chicago one of those bedrooms contains Axon. So with nothing but a distant female voice and a fragile Harold Nono style loop to hold “Still Light” together, it nonetheless becomes clear that the path from the bedroom to the Yellow Brick Road would be the one to take.

Rather obviously European and locked in awe of that analogue electro sound, the disconnected voice of Ash Code robotically recites the emotionless words that sit on top of the beat that drives “Dry Your Eyes” to its inevitable conclusion. No surprises then but done with some style nonetheless.

Curiously light and fluffy for being a song by a somewhat melancholic Swedish band, “Dreams” provides a clear indication that Fou De Toi are well on the way to breaking away from the shackles of their previous retro pop influences. Really rather pleasing.

Trekking through the past on a journey to the holy grail of moody psychedelia. Her voice is more of California back in the days of free love than the Germany of today but that Teutonic precision provides the solid structure that allows her song “Magic Vineyard” to float pleasantly into your headphones and out towards the sunset.

You turn your back for a moment and, lo and behold, you get a trampled by a surfeit of indie pop. Holding their collective head high amongst the crowd however is Family Photo and their song “Eureka” is a fine example of intelligent indie pop with aspirations to the oddball.

So resolutely alt-rock that they must be one of the trendiest band in their native Brighton, Wolf Like Child nonetheless take their decidedly straightforward song “Wars” and infuse it with both a political edge and an oblique feel that is almost French. On balance, I think this band may be too good to be trendy.

Old fashioned but honest in their approach are Belgian band Sweetstone. Their rough sounding demo of “OCC” treads a path familiar to those who have listened to any rock music at all in the last 30 years but their enthusiasm for the task in hand shines through nonetheless.

From the seemingly bottomless pit of retro sounding electropop that they seem to have in Sweden comes yet another practitioner of the ways of pop’s past glories. To her credit, iida makes light work of using her emotive voice to fog the underlying repetition of “Hands” but I would still guess that this will not be the song to break her into mainstream success.

Entertaining manic slice of manic pop cake from Glasgow band Dr Cosmo’s Tape Lab who add a generous amount of sixties psych pop influences as the icing on “Pin The Tail On The Donkey”. Wait a minute – a Glasgow band that isn’t miserable? Could Dr Cosmo’s Tape Lab be the band to finally bring the sunshine back to this no mean city? I think that they could be.