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Tuff Love
Resort
(Lost Map Records)
4/5
RESORT collects the first three EPs from up-and-coming Glasgow low-fi pop duo Tuff Love on one 15-track album.
Self-produced by Julie Eisenstein (guitars, vocals) and Suse Bear (bass, vocals), the record is full of short, no-nonsense songs driven forward by grungy guitars.
There’s a keen pop sensibility hidden among the fuzzy production and DIY attitude, with opener Sweet Discontent mainlining teen angst, while Copper employs the kind of otherworldly vocal exercises and sounds used so brilliantly by The Pixies.
On quieter songs like Sebastian, the soft, shimmering vocals produce a pleasing summer feel.
Naturally nearly all the tracks have one word titles like Penguin, Doberman and Cum.
The US alternative influence is even more obvious when you realise Eisenstein and Bear are singing with American accents.
Your new favourite indie band.
By Ian Sinclair
Pete Astor
Spilt Milk
(Fortuna POP!)
4/5
THE latest album from Pete Astor, a veteran English singer-songwriter and lecturer in music at the University of Westminster, Spilt Milk is a wonderful set of pop tunes in the mould of Darren Hayman and Belle and Sebastian.
Accompanied by James Hoare on guitar, bass, drums, keyboards and backing vocals, there’s nothing flashy or revolutionary here — just assured lyrics and melodic, jangly guitar that go straight to the heart.
My Right Hand is a jaunty number seemingly about the life of an artist that name checks Tony Hancock, Groucho Marx and Marvin Gaye, while the synth-based Very Good Lock eloquently describes the restrictions traditional masculinity can have on a healthy emotional life.
As a back-to-basics album, this is another brilliant example of literate, very English pop music from Fortuna POP!
Delightful.
By Ian Sinclair
Sidestepper
Supernatural Love
(Real World Records)
2/5
THIS Colombian pop quintet suffers from all the obvious and ignominious infestations generated by the now rather worn world-music genre, with its calamitous tendency for emasculating rich, natural indigenous flavours — a bit like the musical equivalent of a Big Mac.
Driven by British expat Richard Blair, this album is a hotchpotch of influences from cumbia to country that, while engaging in the pulsating Fuego Que Te Llama (Fire That Draws You In) or the bouncy Come See Us Playing, descends into the cringe-inducing Celestial, sung perplexingly in both English and a heavily accented Spanish.
Sadly, while such fare will always get bums off seats at the dance floor or wedding party, it’s not ground-breaking or focused enough to be of consequence anywhere else, whatever the PR spin surrounding it.
Must do better.
By Michal Boncza
