Song reviews

I like a bit of class and the mellow jazzy worldliness of Martyna Wren is as fine an example of class as you are likely to get from this sceptered isle. She’s not out to scare your auntie and, in fact, your auntie would welcome her into her home with open arms and an offer of a nice cup of tea. Accordingly, “Al Capone’s Girl” tips its hat at times past whilst remaining eager to please in the present. Your best silver cutlery is safe with this woman.

Mark Saunders – he’s British so he knows the meaning of being taxed until it feels like you have picked up the soap – rants blues style in his cover of “Taxman” with not much more than a slide guitar and a voice partly influenced, at least, by whisky. It’s a cover right enough but he’s got the sentiment right.

“Real Life” is a quite sweet if unadventurous run through the gamut of analogue electro, and indeed retro, sounds and, if anything, serves to show how much better Molly Beanland’s voice is than her material. With a better song, I could see her doing some business.

Hey, this is actually a Swedish band although their name pretty much indicates both their style and influences. “Twenty Nine”, despite the best efforts of vocalist Anders Nilsson, is yet another retake of that west coast sound of the seventies American folk rock sound. The present is once more written in the past.

It’s been a while since we last heard from Will Tang and, with “Lifetime”, he has taken a temporary break from being a blues powered music missionary to show all those sensitive singer songwriters out there how to do it properly with this simple, stripped out song. Talent, as they say, always rises to the top.

Riffing down the middle of the indie rock highway are Weatherbird. “Where Eye Wanna Be” is certainly the kind of song that you would expect of manly boys on the way up but, when it comes down to it, we’ve all heard this kind of thing before. Many, many times before.

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.