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.

Let's Wrestle - 'Let's Wrestle'

Well, this is ramshackle and basic fare, and therefore something I instantly love. I swear I like complex, subtle music too. But when it comes down to it it’s the primitive, brain-dodging urgency of rock and roll and pop music that really makes me happy. We should celebrate stupid music more. At the moment the twin pillars for me seem to be the insistent, reinvented blues of White Denim, a band who might finally be worth the hype, and the rediscovered classic pop of Lykke Li, for whom I seem to have developed an embarrassing adolescent crush. I would fill virtual pages about both of these if I wasn’t so bloody busy working these days. But they both seem to me contemporary returns to time-honoured sources. Equally elemental is this eponymous gem from Let’s Wrestle, a beered-up, belligerent male-bonding anthem that should be bellowed by crowds of bad shirt wearers at Friday night chucking out time down the local Wetherspoon’s. “Let’s wrestle, let’s fucking wrestle,” goes the chorus, and that’s most of it. There’s virtually nothing to this. It’s troglodyte stuff, the only touch of attempted class added by the gold-coloured vinyl. I need to see these guys perform it live, and won’t even mind the inevitable lager shower. I like the Fallesque cut of Let’s Wrestle’s jib, allied with a Fall fan’s nerdishness about bands and record collections (see their earlier records; they’re all good). This is, in summary, nothing more than simplistic, dumb, primitive and clumsy. You will understand by now, of course, that these are words of praise.

Fuck Dress - 'Suburban Nietzsche Freak'

"God is dead, so I listen to Radiohead."

Quite so. How refreshing once in a while to find an utter throwback of a tune like this. Here we are with a slice of indie back from when that degraded word ever meant anything. This has surely wormed its way through a rent in the fabric of time from 1985. (Perhaps Radiohead were actually named after this lyric then?) The label of the day is In Tape Records. The Fall are going through one of their periodic spells when they are fashionable and it's cool to acknowledge their manifest influence on all music (these moments are interspersed with long spells where everyone forgets about The Fall, but they keep working regardless). Yeah Yeah Noh are putting the fun back into being pretentious. The Membranes are the next big thing. The June Brides are surely going to change the world. And all records sound like this: thin guitar, robotically thudding drums, and two singers, a deep-voiced male and an accompanying female, apparently stood too far away from the microphone. Things are recorded in sheds, and sound like it. The lyrics are alienated, knowing and not afraid of wearing their smartness on their sleeves.

Yep, I like this, like it a lot, and I'm going to listen to it 27 times and then file it away for the next 10 years before rediscovering and being confused by it. It currently exists only in non-physical form but is due a real release from NROne records - no idea of the capitalisation there, it's a guess - sometime next month, and you can pre-order it (not an expression I have ever understood) there. Nrone has become one of those quietly good labels which most of the time gets it right. Inevitably there's a Myspace site, which rather shatters the illusion that it's 1985, when we were all using ZX Spectrums, and there are other tunes knocking around the internet, none of which, inevitably, are as great as this.

Yet another fuck band, by the way, in what's getting to be quite a collection, but it's becoming a bit boring to keep pointing this out, isn't it?

Mogwai - 'Young Team' reissue

In the main, I manage to resist reissues. Of course, I’m a Fall fan, so the house is cluttered with their repeat offerings of the same LP. We’re talking three figures by now. My view is everyone’s allowed one act where they buy all the reissues, lives, bootlegs and pretty much any pointless everything, and mine is The Fall. It could be worse. Some people do it with Bob Dylan. But boy, the CDs just pile up. Recently, when returning from holiday, I opened the door to find it jamming against shiny discs strewn across the front room. At first the inevitable burglary was feared, but then the pleasantly mundane reality of it became clear: there’d been a CD collapse. Piles of them, and piles upon piles, were stacked precariously on speakers, and on top of bulgingly full racks. The faintest breath of wind would have been enough. Probably somebody slammed a door in a neighbouring house. Even now they sit higgledy-piggledy towered upon the floor awaiting the imposition of some kind of order.

Anyway, I don’t do reissues, but this one was always something special. There are times when Mogwai are the most important band in my life, and it’s still their t-shirt I wear probably more times than I should. I do have other clothes, I’m just proud of them. Ten years on, it would be hard to explain the impact of this record to some post-rock neophyte. There have been so many subsequent copyists that it’s difficult to get across how different, how shocking this music was. Of course they weren’t the first to do it, just the first to get it right. It redefined the rules. Most of the songs didn’t have lyrics. They were as long as they cared to be. They had very quiet and shockingly loud bits, or sometimes just quiet bits. It’s art stuff, but it’s rock.

But hearing it now I curse my cloth-eared 20-something self. I was then yet labouring with a mostly ideological misconception that all music should be three minute pop songs. Oh sure, I liked it enough, on then-novel double vinyl, but still it feels I missed a trick. Now, in an evidently louder and clearer edition, it seems it should have been life-changing. Meanwhile, all the other CDs pile up, inessential, and for this last week I barely listened to anything else. All other offerings sound flat. I only need this more.

This is an epic, infinite affair. I found it seizing on different emotional states and amplifying them. The twin peaks, Like Herod and Mogwai Fear Satan, had me strolling euphoric in sunshine one day, noticing leaves on trees like these were new things. The next day, they had me sobbing. And it’s really hard not to do this without talking about the sounds of stars dying or planets imploding. This is end of the world music. It turns everything into a scene from a film. It's your personal epic soundtrack.

About halfway through the week, I realised this is what I want to be listening to on my headphones as I leave this life. Of course, I hope that isn’t for a long time yet, but I can’t imagine a better soundtrack to go out to. If I time it right, the last notes of Fear Satan would be the final thing I hear on earth. I want this noted by the relevant authorities, and am prepared to carry a card to this effect.