High Places - 'Vision's The First...'

One of the invented traditions of the household is that over the course of the festive period - roughly defined as covering the spell between Christmas Eve and whenever we must depart to bring light to the lives of our adoring relatives in a series of small, drab and not even particularly snowy northern towns - only appropriately seasonal music may be played. Fortunately or otherwise I have over the considerable stretch of my existence acquired a vast quantity of poor grade yuletide indie tuneage by the yard. There’s about a solid day’s worth of such, which each December 24th gets duly transferred to the trusty MP3 player and before New Year’s Eve (and there are, of course, even one or two decent songs about that particular dark night of the soul too) is equally quickly removed to free up some space for further swathes of live Fall bootlegs. The thing is, Christmas tunes can’t be innately bad, because even The Fall have recorded several of them over the long, long years. It’s just, they’re never as good as a band’s proper, non-festive work, are they? Would you choose to listen to even The Fall’s Xmas offerings ahead of their regular stuff? Just like in the real world, in music, no one saves their best for Christmas.

So it will come as some relief on the train north when once again regular listening habits will be resumed. First up will be this tune, from High Places, with which I am thoroughly beguiled. As usual, I am late on this one, and, as is equally customary, I know next to nothing about the band. This surfaced as a single on Upset the Rhythm, who also put on catchable gigs in old London town, and subsequently led me to a CD available from the redoubtable Thrill Jockey label. It’s a mysterious, slight and charming thing, distorted, like an favourite old tune found mangled on a chewed up Memorex tape (and I swear, cassette tapes are about to make a comeback). It’s a jaunty pop number - I hear Rihanna’s immortal Umbrella in this - mingled with and undermined by the shimmering clutter you get in A Sunny Day In Glasgow and the by now customary global village rhythms. It's a fractured kaleidoscope of a song. A smidgen of steel drum I hear at one point, for example. You could dance to this, but you'd probably dislocate something.

This is not the sort of website that offers up top ten lists of the year, but if it was, there's a good chance this would be on it. Once again I note in closing they're from New York. They own us these days.

The Wave Pictures - 'Long Island'

Our love for the Wave Pictures is already a matter of record, although when they first crossed the path of attention, we admitted some doubts. Not so now. We’ve since been utterly sucked into their world, and there seems to be little we can, or indeed want, to do about it. That single, I Love You Like A Madman and subsequent LP Instant Coffee Baby were our gateway drugs. Live they then clinched the deal. They’re pretty much the ultimate finely honed, value for money, good time guaranteed live band, inheriting the mantle - not that any criticism is thereby implied - from our old friends the Broken Family Band, as the act you could catch time and again at one of their frequent live shows and always know you were going to enjoy yourself. Now we see the Wave Pictures whenever we can, and we raid backwards through their back catalogue, past previous LP Sophie (while noting with bewilderment the inclusion of Instant Coffee Baby on the best debut LP of the year shortlist of those with it hep cats the Guardian) to the slew of early, rough and ready and utterly charming CD-Rs.

Long Island - wherein someone looks beautiful in lubricant - first surfaced, unless you know better, on Sophie, and was recently given a wash and brush up as part of a digital only EP, Pigeons, from the behemoth iTunes. Being venerators of the physical object, we’re not sure if we approve of the idea of the virtual only release (although we love seven inchers that come with free download codes, which help us sleep easier at nights) but this would appear to have been done for good, green reasons. Hey, we care about the planet here, even to the extent of reducing our meat rations and taking the occasional holiday in Wales, so this is to be applauded. This is the one where they walked to the studio, ran the equipment on wind power, mastered it using discarded brown, organic bread crusts, had only fresh rainwater for lunch etc. In its original form Long Island was a firm family favourite and in its new guise it only gains from a more muscular re-working. You could dance to this one, prior to hoping to win a grand in your hand on a Friday night. It’s all pianos and handclaps and sparkly, slinky clothes. You know when Orange Juice went disco? It’s nearly as good as that.

In short, we like. But then, you knew we were always going to do. And now we're off to see them live again.

The Dodos - 'Winter'

There are, ultimately, only so many ways of saying fuck, this is great, but fuck, this is great.

Here's a precise, controlled offering from the Dodos, the latest in a wave of US bands who wash up on these shores and do what we used to do ourselves, only better. It comes in cycles. Just accept it. It's their turn, and hey, America's cool again now, right?

Their stuff is a heady mix of disparate influences, and there is pointy-headed musicological fun, if you are that way inclined, to be had in unravelling them. Right now West Coast psychedelia, modern folk, the Walker Brothers maybe and more recently Beirut are springing to mind, but whenever I say something like this someone will correct me and leave a spot-on comment underlining what a cloth-eared dolt I really am. A year later. Or how about they're sort of like Yeasayer, but without the Genesis thing going on? This one's simple and complex at the same time, always a winning combination in this parish. Deep, eighties indie drums are joined by what I'd very much like to be a mandolin, and then lucious, almost crooning vocal. Someone appears to have been having a bad time of it, but will be over the worst ere next spring. Then a mournful bit of brass completes the job.

And of course it is, err, winter right now, at least in this particular hemisphere, but this is, for once, no lame attempt on this website's part to be topical. Tales of regret and longing suit any season, and I stumbled upon it only recently via the magic of Hype Machine, where you can find this and more. It is now frequently played on that great radio station that goes in my head and finds its way onto many a CD pressed into the reluctant hands of bewildered and begrudging acquintances. It's from an LP called Visiter - ah, those cute mispellings - which has been out for an age and which for some reason I don't seem to have, and for this I can only beg forgiveness and promise to take according corrective measures.

The Lovely Eggs - 'Have You Ever Heard A Digital Accordion?'

Oh, by the way, this is now officially the new best thing ever, and replaces all previous best things ever. We had a meeting about it and that was what was decided, okay? As is often the case, the Massive Crush taste committee were a little late getting around to this particular agenda item, as this tune has been huge in the world of proper music blogs that you can download stuff from for literally weeks, but you do realise how hard it is to get us all together for a meeting?

Anyway, we need new words in the English language to describe the casual and slightly crap genius of this latest offering. It's playground, nursery rhyme stuff, childishly sung, in a Talulah Gosh sort of way, that offers a new and escalatingly bizarre hipster checklist by which you will be judged and will fail. At which point they will sigh 'oh dear' and move on to the slimmer guy with a better cardigan than you and a full set of Pastels badges. It's the aural equivalent of one of those word ladder games that go from hate to love in five steps, taking us from digital accordions to time travelling in a De Lorean via a route that could best be described as entirely arbitrary. And then it rocks out. Of course you hear the Moldy Peaches in this and all your favourite mid to late eighties shambling anorak bands, and is there anything wrong with that exactly?

So, the Lovely Eggs. We love them. This forms part of a value for money five tune seven incher which gets quite Bearsuity and for which we're indebted to Cherryade records, whose releases are very rarely not worth a listen. Rudimentary googling, meanwhile, reveals a connection to the once-revered Angelica, who made us very happy once upon a time with 'Teenage Girl Crush'. Around these parts we prefer to listen to our music rather than watch it, but an amusing and indeed mildly disturbing video is also to be seen on the ubiquitous YouTube.

Go to it, kids. This is an order.

Vivian Girls - 'Where Do You Run To'

My most recent alien abduction was at least rather shorter than that which once took this website out of circulation for about two and a half years. At least two of you have been in touch to express concern about my whereabouts. Well, what can I say? Sometimes life happens, and sometimes work happens, and sometimes both happen at the same time, and sometimes I even get the two mixed up. But back confined to this humble planet pop, what has been missed? Tottering piles of CDs and sevens, and bland folders full of sound files, demand attention. The products of three figure gleeful plunders of record shops, the only trolley dash I ever really do, lurk largely with their price stickers intact, a sure sign that they have yet to be adequately dealt with. It occasionally occurs to me that an obsession with sound has ruined my life, but I’m not sure I’d have had it any other way. And some palpably good things have floated up of late. Of the various crystal bands, Crystal Stilts may turn out to be the best. I’ve also found myself begrudgingly admiring this TV on the Radio LP, even though it sounds like music I don’t think I like, and getting to grips with Gang Gang Dance. I need to listen to Those Dancing Days more, but seem too busy working my way through the Wave Pictures’ back catalogue, having now, working backwards, reached the delights of their early, self-released CD-Rs. That Mirror Mirror LP with the preposterous name is continuing to puzzle me - I still can’t quite work out if it’s brilliant or terrible - and Chairlift, via an advert for a music player, appear to have become famous. If we were the sort of website which we are not, we would claim that we championed them first. Then I’ve spent the last week immersed in a slew of frankly varying bootlegs from the recent live adventures of The Fall (I spent two nights at the Hackney Empire with them, one great, one good) and, following a recent gig, realising once again the skewed genius of Connan Mockasin. There’s enough there for you to get stuck into, no?

This self-titled Vivian Girls LP, which has of course been out for an age, has got me under its thumb a bit too. It’s taking me back to where it all started, and to the music of my youth, mid 1980s shambly, jangly, guitar music: a seminal, and indeed political movement, although we didn’t realise it at the time. I thought music was always like that. Only later would it become clear to me that we were living at a special moment, where for once music would not be about bombast, swagger and sex, but about those other human things like embarrassment, frailty and making a bit of a mess. Bands were amateurish and tried their best. It was art, but it wasn’t art wank. I’ve been looking for that honesty and simplicity ever since, while that era, mislabelled at the time as C86, mislabelled since as twee, occasionally spirals back into vogue, as seems to be the case now.

So how could my teenaged, shy, anorak-wearing self know that my late 30s fat, creased and frankly ugly incarnation would really be getting into a record that sounds a lot like the Shop Assistants? The whole thing’s brief. There’s ten songs on this LP, but the Vivian Girls get in and get out in 20-odd minutes. I admire this. There are too many hour-long CDs in the world already. And the whole thing sounds like it was recorded in a biscuit tin. The guitars thrash and the drums flail and both are equal. The choruses are more important than the verses. The vocals are tinny. All of this is great. I think my favourite tune here is Where Do You Run To, with its Mary Chain bass but annoying lack of question mark, but really, all the songs sound pretty much the same. And that’s part of the point. I just wish it was on a series of flexi discs rather than a CD.