HeCTA
The Diet
(City Slang)
4/5

LAMBCHOP released Nixon, their classic soul-drenched Americana album 15 years ago. Now lead singer Kurt Wagner and two other band members have formed electric-pop outfit HeCTA and recorded their debut record.

The art-school educated Wagner has always made left-field music and here he gives his experimental side free rein.

The bleeping beats and beeps on Pretty Ghetto, impossible not to move around to, are catchy as hell. Elsewhere Concept includes spoken word gangster homilies while the industrial ’80s synths on Sympathy for the Auto Industry are strangely reminiscent of the Terminator soundtrack.

Apparently Wagner was partly inspired by reading a history of Americana dance music in the ’70s. There is no twang and definitely no pedal steel guitar — just refreshing electronica as cool as anything a 20-something hipster might concoct on their laptop.

Small Feet                                                                                                                                                             From Far Enough Away Everything Sounds Like The Ocean                                                                                     (Control Freak Kitten Records)                                                                                                                                   4/5

SONGWRITER Simon Stalhamre, frontman of Swedish guitar trio Small Feet, may well hail from Stockholm. But it’s perhaps because he learned English from US sitcoms or was co-produced by US musician Jacob Snavely that makes Small Feet’s first album such an impressive slice of Americana.

Powerful and piercing, like the vocals of My Morning Jacket’s Jim James, Stalhamre’s voice is a thing of wonder. The mid-tempo songs are littered with references to gathering storms, thunder, the dark and night-time, suggesting emotional and social malaise.

Elsewhere, there’s a gloomy sense of the apocalyptic. “Sometimes I worry about the future,” he sings on Palm Trees while, on the intense Bend Towards The Light, “There is an ark being built that you will never find.”

An impressive, self-assured debut.

Sextile
A Thousand Hands
(Felte)
3/5

THIS debut album from Los Angeles-based four-piece Sextile is an intense, unhinged ride. Apparently, the record was inspired by one of the band members experiencing, ahem, “spirit channelling” while doing, ahem again, “open-eye meditation.”

Get past the pretension and you’re left with a bloody-minded shock to the ears that mixes dark indie sounds, punk, heavy metal and industrial music.

With its dirty riffs and metallic percussion, the exhilarating Visions of You bursts out of the speakers at 100 miles an hour.

The song so closely apes Ian Curtis’s God-like vocal style and Joy Division’s music, listeners will think a time machine has sent them back to 1979.

Elsewhere Shattered Youth echoes the majestic gloom of Echo and the Bunnymen, while the high-energy Can’t Take It employs brilliant synths and smouldering guitar licks.

A cathartic, theatrical and often disturbing set.