Paul Collins – King Of Power Pop - February 2011 February 6th, 2011

Nobody told Paul Collins guitars were over. Thirty-five years into his career, the former songwriter of The Nerves re-embraces that skinny tie and white sneakers Seventies punk pop sound, and you are duty bound to fall in love with his latest album. King Of Power Pop is precision-engineered to embed itself into your subconscious, each…

Refried Ice Cream – Witness To The Storm - January 2011 January 30th, 2011

Sixty-seven year old Denny Brewer and his son, Denny Junior, form the nucleus of Refried Ice Cream, operating out of a home studio East of El Paso. Their website mixes anti-establishment paranoia with natural remedy advice. “Criminals are running our government!” “Use cinnamon to help diabetes!” Their album features sententious gobbets of beatnik wisdom and…

The June – Green Fields And Rain - January 2011 January 30th, 2011

On their second album, The June re-animate familiar sixties sounds via the conduits of the Eighties American Paisley underground bands and the Nineties Britpop groups that also assimilated them. Despite the trio hailing from Parma, Italy, Christian Ravanetti perfectly replicates Liam Gallagher’s nasally elongations of John Lennon’s flattened Liverpool vowels. The June’s vintage Rickenbackers sound…

Jeff The Brotherhood – Heavy Days - January 2011 January 23rd, 2011

The title track of Tennessee’s Jeff The Brotherhood’s fourth album seesaws on a pulverising riff indebted to Hawkwind’s Master Of The Universe. The hoary acid pirates have become a legitimate source of plunder for a distorted three-string guitar and drums garage-psyche duo. Elsewhere Sonic Youth’s surging rock fixtures are appropriated, their experimental fittings ignored, and…

The Dirtbombs – Party Store - January 2011 January 23rd, 2011

Mick Collins, The Dirtbombs’ front-man, is one of American garage punk’s lone black voices. In 2001, the Detroit band’s Ultraglide In Black album hot-wired Seventies soul standards with scratchy guitars. Ten years later, Party Store offers chunky analogue facsimiles of famous Detroit techno tunes of the Eighties, attempting another cross-cultural hybridisation. It’s a fantastic conceit,…

The Puddle – Playboys In The Bush - January 2011 January 21st, 2011

The New Zealand lo-fi legends The Puddle’s engagingly sloppy indie-pop was epically unadorned. But what the band’s own press release tellingly describes as ‘florid saxophone embellishments’ on some songs here, suggest that for a quarter century these apparently inspired folk-art amateurs might actually have been frustrated exponents of emotionally explicit mainstream rock. There’s a sub-Velvets…