Armed with an unhealthy obsession with Donald Fagen, an admiration for Todd Rundgren and a liking of Badfinger, Malcolm Moore and David Myers (aka The 1957 Tail-Fin Fiasco) set to work in their quest to create proper “pop music for grown-ups”. With all manner of invented characters and scenarios to share the British duo laboured hard, writing and recording at various locations into the small hours in an attempt to bring results that tipped the hat to their myriad heroes in a most appropriate manner. Unleashed to an unsuspecting world at the beginning of 2013, their first release ‘Private Jet Flashback’ is a sophisticated work comprising of seven glossy pop/rock ditties. The results are almost guaranteed to thrill those with a retro ear, a liking of an off-kilter lyric and – perhaps most importantly of all – a craving for tunes that have the kind of love and care afforded to those Steely Dan and 10cc records of yesteryear.
Monthly Archives: October 2014
Bloodshot Dawn: new video
Bloodshot Dawn’s second album ‘Demons’ is released in the UK on October 26th. Ahead of the release, the band have issued a video for ‘Smoke and Mirrors’ which you can view in full below.
Less Than Jake/Yellowcard co-headline European tour
Third wave ska punk legends Less Than Jake will be teaming up with Yellowcard for a short run of dates across Europe next spring. The UK stint includes two shows at London’s Koko, formally the Camden Palace.
GAY ELVIS – Has Left The Building EP
Gay Elvis is the long-serving bassist with New Jersey based alt-rock/power pop band Readymade Breakup. In between work with that band, he’s tinkered with extra-curricular recordings, the first fruits of which surfaced as a free download track ‘Morning Cigarette’ in 2012. Since then, he’s embraced fatherhood. Various songwriting sessions since then yielded the bones some thirty or so songs, but by the musician’s own admission, those songs tackled the same topics repeatedly – how it sucks to grow up, how growing up can turn you into a loser and ultimately how growing up is inevitable…and cool. No matter how the tunes sounded, the sentiments were always pre-occupied with maturity. In this sense, he had hoped that his solo release would “be [his] ‘Pet Sounds’ or ‘Abbey Road’”. Things don’t always turn out as planned and after shelving lots of incomplete material for a later convenience, the result is this three song EP. Judging by these songs, it’s a shame we didn’t get just a little bit more…
THE SUMMIT – Social EP
Taking huge musical cues from Kings of Leon, The Killers and early Franz Ferdinand, on their 2014 EP ‘Social’, Kansas City quartet The Summit present six chunks of guitar driven pop-rock. Their general hooks are focused on radio play and occasionally things work in their favour, but there’s a homespun rawness to their recordings which suggests this band – and their song craft – is still very much a work in progress.