Mirror Mirror - 'New Horizons'

I recently had something of a clear-out and unearthed and distributed to bemused friends a number of duplicate seven inch singles. It happens. I go to the shop and can’t remember whether I already have something. There’s a vague list somewhere, but never with me. And then I buy things on the internet and while they're on their way via creaky post I forget and grab them on some trawl through the physical racks.

This was one, but I didn't mind having it twice, and consider the recipient of my second copy a lucky man. Mirror Mirror are another band I know nothing about, burnishing further my deserved reputation for finger on the pulse musical punditry. A cursory search of the web reveals at least one other band who got the name first, specialising in bad metal, and if I can't find it on the internet straight away then I can't find it. All I know is that this is a great record which has begun to haunt me. It sounds like it was recorded in a tunnel, but a beautiful brick tunnel deep in the country with brilliant, blinding white light pervading one end, or perhaps in the vaults of a minor cathedral. Let's move towards the light. This is slow-paced, blissful but spooky; it's choral; it makes me want to join a cult. Providing it was a cult with good music. I'd like this playing at two am as I fall asleep. I'd have beautiful dreams. It would also be suitable for a funeral in a rural church on a sunny day. Any takers?

An obvious point of comparison would be Low before they got boring, and it's on Half Machine records, which is now officially a pretty good record label.

The Chap - 'Fun and Interesting'

Of late much of this website's music-listening has been live, at gigs. This site does not, you will understand, do festivals. We don’t camp, and we don’t stand in a field bellowing and waving our arms to trite ‘indie’ anthems with lumpen thousands of people we would normally cross the street to avoid. But the festival season - which now encompasses, it seems, much of the year - has created a beneficial kind of waste product as bands on the al fresco circuit must warm up or warm down at proper venues with roofs, occasionally working toilets and a public transport route back to the comfort of one’s own bed, many of these in the city that we choose to make our home but which we're now too embarrassed to name after the last elections. Thus at this time of year we are able to construct a kind of parallel - or is that serial? - festival of our own by forcing ourselves out night after night to small, smelly, scruffy venues. Recently we’ve caught A Sunny Day In Glasgow (luscious, layered, cute and complex pop), They Came From The Stars I Saw Them (daffy space jazz), The Wave Pictures (literate, nerdy indie pop), Ballboy (vintage literate, nerdy indie pop, good to have 'em back) , The Flaming Stars (skinny 1950s noir rock and roll), Bearsuit (cherished art noise poppers, wasted on this occasion on an unappreciative crowd of wankers), a double bill of Health (structured, precise noise) and No Age (enjoyable West Coast surf punk dudes who the kids loved) and most recently Shit and Shine (epic, mechanised, motorised, turbo-charged noise). Phew. No wonder we're knackered. At times of heavy gigging the site finds we're either listening to the band we're going to see next or playing them again after last night reminded us how wonderful they were (and all the above were) and so the rest of it piles up neglected. Truly, we need more ears.

All of which is merely lengthy and over-written apology to all three of you for the lack of recent updating of these pages. Did we mention we’ve also been away a bit, in Scotland and Belfast again? And none of which has anything to do with this next tune from The Chap, which has been knocking around my head and demanding attention these past two weeks or so. It’s one of those that worms its way in, burrows down and stays there. Here’s a cool and somehow simultaneously camp electronic offering, with an operatic chorus nicely undermined by a spoken voice intoning “good, good, super, super” and so on. We find it curiously uplifting. Perhaps if Sparks were any good this is what they’d sound like. It may be about cloning, and let‘s be honest, we‘d all clone ourselves if we could.

But gosh, what a wholly inadequate description this all is. This one’s beyond us, it seems. So let’s just say it’s great, and I remember now these people doing another song we loved, ‘I Am Oozing Emotion’, and it makes me wonder why we haven’t yet investigated further. Gross negligence on our parts. This recent single comes from an LP, 'Mega Breakfast', which is now on our shopping list, and if we have to choose between this and essentials like bread and milk, we’ll buy the record.