RUSSIANS!

What an intro!

At long last! Something new from Belfast’s bestest electropopsters! Quick, everyone gather round and adore this band! If you like synths and perfect pop songs, you will love this. No really, you bloody well will.

I think I am addicted to weeklies. It all started quite innocently with fishing out a copy of Love It! Magazine to read in the bath. Next was Take A Break, followed by Real People and there isn’t an end in sight.

… so how can you beat it?

Sounds helpful enough, doesn’t it?

Keep reading …

Up until now I didn’t even know this venue existed. Looks like the evil Barfly people are expanding left, right and centre. The venue is okay, if a little small and the sound is abysmal. Mind you, never trust a sound engineer with dreadlocks.

I'll begin with the promotional literature because it left me fairly confused. In a bid to be whimsically clever it manages to tell me nothing about the band except that they dislike Bono and Johnny Borrell and (presumably) they hate writing biographies. Don't we all, but this doesn't give you carte blanche to write something as bad as this:

Superman Revenge Squad is one man, formerly half of Nosferatu D2, formerly a third of Tempertwig, so clearly worthy of attention. One man and a guitar is generally not the most arresting of things musically and even the best songsmiths can be rendered dull and empty by the process, but SRS avoids this somehow.

Christmas! The time where most people visit their parents for the holidays. Like some twisted new episode of Back To The Future, we end up in our former bedrooms. Only that they’re no longer our bedrooms. No time was wasted to transform the bunkbedded, postered havens of our childhood into guestrooms (but why. Parents’ visitors don’t stay over night, do they?). Mine’s now ‘the library’. Even the bed has gone. I am reduced to sleeping on the sofa in my own bloody room.

2007 has been a good year for the Helen Love fan collective. A new album and a new single! You have to import it from Spain still, because it isn’t out in the UK yet (argh!). It is lovely though. The cover is particularly pleasant – it has a girl with good hair and headphones on it. Whoever this is, I do want to go to her clubnight. No really, I do.

It’s My Club is a fun, partly vocodered discoey number. We got bubblegum punkrock disco soul … we got glitter dance floors … we got backbeat, baby. Ooooh, do you really?

This is very much a personal take on 2007 and shouldn't be taken as the view of the site as a whole, if the site could be considered to have such a thing.

10. Shellac - Excellent Italian Greyhound

Not Shellac's best record and I debated leaving it out for a long time and bringing in maybe Liars or Thurston Moore at the bottom. There are eight great tracks and one (Genuine Lulabelle) that's usually a stinker unless you're in the mood for a bit of rambling nonsense, but those other eight are really good. The main issue is that the Peel sessions of End of Radio, Paco, Steady as She Goes and Spoke are all much meatier sounding and possibly better takes. Surely everyone prefers "Play the drums!" to be barked out rather than murmured quietly? I do, but then maybe that's just because that's how I heard it first. So I decided to ignore the 'spoiling' nature of what I'd downloaded and consider how great I'd have thought all these songs were if it was my first listen. Certainly a better record than 1000 Hurts, maybe better than Terraform and deserving of a position in the top 10.