I hope everyone is making the most of these last weeks of summer. August is historically slow in the music industry and you can feel the pressure build for the onslaught of new releases and tours that will flood us after Labor Day but until then, it’s an easygoing week in Indie Basement. I review new albums from The Soundcarriers, Quivers, Pom Poko, and Hifi Sean & David McAlmont, plus Panda Bear & Sonic Boom‘s new EP with mariachi covers of songs from their album Reset.
HiFi Sean is former Soup Dragons frontman Sean Dickson and for this week’s Indie Basement Classic, I look at that band’s first US release, the Hang-Ten! compilation, from way back in 1987.
You say you need more new album reviews? Andrew turns a critical ear to the latest from Starflyer 59, Wishy, Gel, Tinashe, and more in Notable Releases.
Last week I was in Oslo, Norway for the 2024 Øya Festival where I saw Pulp, Jack White, IDLES, Janelle Monae, PJ Harvey, Slowdive, Yard Act, Nia Archives, Yard Act, Casiokids and about 50 other acts. Read my recap here.
It was a slow news week, but I am excited that Alex Ross Perry’s Pavement movie, Pavements, will make its US premiere at the New York Film Festival.
Head below for this week’s reviews.
The Soundcarriers – Through Other Reflections (Phosphonic)
Fan of Broadcast and Stereolab? You need The Soundcarriers in your life and their fifth album is a great place to start.
Over the course of 17 years, Nottingham, UK’s The Soundcarriers have carved out their own corner of the sophisticated baroque psych genre, mixing ’60s psych, ’70s krautrock and tropicalia for a sound that is compatible with, yet distinct from, Stereolab, Vanishing Twin, Broadcast, Saint Etienne and other space age bachelor pad dwellers. Where some of their previous albums had an almost clinical sheen as if created in a lab (not a criticism per se), their fifth album sounds like an actual band playing live. As always, The Soundcarriers are experts at recreating those 1969 sonics — those early Scott Walker records for example — and they especially do wonders with percussion, be it the echo on congas or a sharp crack on the edge of a ride cymbal. That gives songs like “Already Over,” “Feel the Way,” “City Was,” and the album’s best song, “Comet 4,” extra punch and pop. Through Other Reflections is a feast for the ears with a wide array of vintage sounds — vintage keyboards (mellotrons, celestes, combo organs), flute, vibraphone, flinty/groovy bass, not to mention the harmonies of Leonore Wheatley and Dorian Conway — and all deployed perfectly on this sonic trip through the looking glass
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HiFi Sean & David McAlmont – DAYLIGHT (Plastique Recordings)
The former Soup Dragons frontman Sean Dickson and the onetime Bernard Butler collaborator David McAlmont release their second album of homemade house bangers
Former Soup Dragons frontman Sean Dickson has been making housey dance music as Hifi Sean for nearly a decade (and led The High Fidelity before that) and has collaborated on singles with everyone from Bootsy Collins to Dave Ball (Soft Cell), Fred Schneider (B-52’s), Yoko Ono and ’90s dance icons Paris Grey (Inner City) and Crystal Waters. He found his muse, though, with David McAlmont, the soulful singer who is best known for making two albums with former Suede guitarist Bernard Butler in the mid-’90s and early-’00s. McAlmont has the pipes to belt out the kind of massive, classic house anthems HiFi Sean has become very good at producing. DAYLIGHT is their second collaborative album and while there’s a decidedly created-on-laptop-at-home feel to this collection, it just adds to the handmade charm of this record. McAlmont sings the hell out of quirky tunes like “Meantime,” “Sun Come Up,” and “USB to USC” (whose lyrics are like a packing checklist for a work trip), adding immeasurable sophistication and class with his voice. The whole album is a blast but two songs stand above the rest: with a throbbing synth bassline and syncopated beat, “Golden Hour” is DAYLIGHT’s most irresistible jam, while “Sad Banger” lives up to its tears on the dancefloor title.
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INDIE BASEMENT CLASSIC: The Soup Dragons – Hang-Ten! (Sire, 1987)
Before they discovered rave, The Soup Dragons were a scrappy Glasgow band making buzzsaw powerpop. This early singles comp hold up very well.
Most know Glasgow band The Soup Dragons for their early 1990s rave cover of The Rolling Stones’ “I’m Free,” and their 1992 electro alt-rock hit “Divine Thing” (which went to #26 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1992), but they got their start as one of a slew of bands that sprouted in the wake of The Jesus & Mary Chain’s game-changing, tinnitus-inducing 1984 debut, “Upside Down.” Their early singles were irresistible buzzsaw guitar pop, loaded with “bah bah bah” choruses, big hooks, and fuzzed-out guitars, all propelled by a velocity that sounded like the band might go off the rails if their songs ever went longer than two minutes. What they lacked in musical skill they made up for in catchy tunes and boundless enthusiasm. The band signed to Sire Records in the US (home of Talking Heads, Echo & The Bunnymen, The Smiths, more) and their first release for the label compiled the 10 songs from their Hang-Ten!, Whole Wide World and Head Gone Astray EPs. This is Soup Dragons at their shambolically charming best, and “Just Mind Your Step Girl,” “Whole Wide World,” and “I Know Everything,” are pretty undeniable.
In 1988, The Soup Dragons released their debut album, This is Our Art, which didn’t quite have the magic of those early singles, possibly to due to meddling from their American label who soon dropped them. That same year, like everyone else under 30 in the UK, they discovered ecstasy and bought baggy clothing and drum machines. Those subsequent records, Lovegod and Hotwired, are fun but dated (“I’m Free” dated in a good way I think). This collection of early singles, however, holds up great in 2024.
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Pom Poko – Champion (Bella Union)
Olso band keep you on your toes with their third album of hooky, off-kilter indie rock
As mentioned at the top of today’s column, last week I was in Oslo for Øya Fest where i saw probably 20 Norwegian bands (in addition to Pulp, PJ Harvey, Yard Act, IDLES, and more). Somehow none of them were Pom Poko who live right there! (They have played Øya before, but not this year.) Listening to their terrific third album, I would’ve liked to have seen these songs played live. Pom Poko are pop songwriters at heart but this band have a mathy streak; right when you think you know where a track like “You’re Really Not Helping” is going, they throw a curveball while making a left turn. They also have a fondness for skronky guitar which adds grit to an otherwise pleasant ditty. Example: “I want to scream, do you want to?” sings singer/lyricist Ragnhild Fangel Jamtveit in a lovely lilt on “Pile Of Wood,” and it’s both a question and an invitation. She never raises her voice, but lets the guitars do the screaming and has you asking “what unexpected twist is coming next?” Champion keeps you delightfully on your toes throughout.
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Panda Bear & Sonic Boom w/ Mariachi 2000 de Cutberto Pérez – Reset Mariachi (Domino)
Did you have “Mariachi versions of Panda Bear & Sonic Boom songs” on your bingo card?
Panda Bar & Sonic Boom released the wonderful Reset in 2022 and later that same year released an album of “songbook” karaoke instrumentals and remixes. Then in 2023 Reset in Dub that they made with On-U Sound’s Adrian Sherwood. Now, in a surprising turn, they’ve released this EP featuring songs from the album reimagined with Mexico City’s Mariachi 2000 de Cutberto Pérez which they say is “the final chapter in the Reset story.”
“We had the idea to record with a Mexican mariachi party band going back to ‘Tropic of Cancer’ from the Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper LP, but it was always just a pipe dream & circumstances never came together,” says Sonic Boom. “Then last year, knowing we were shortly to head to Mexico for a show, we asked our Mexican friend & sound tech Oswaldo Terrones if he had contacts with any mariachi in Mexico. He did … and also with a studio specializing in mariachi recording.”
Working over two sessions in Mexico and Portugal, the mariachi musicians handled the music, Sonic Boom and Panda Bear provided percussion, and everyone sang the translated lyrics. There are two different mariachi versions each of “Danger” (“Peligro”) and “Livin’ in the After” (“Viviendo en las sequelas”): one with Panda Bear singing and one with Mariachi 2000 de Cutberto Pérez singing. With handclaps and ’60s pop samples as the original Reset songs’ backbone, maybe it’s not really a surprise that these songs translate to Mariachi as well as they do, and there’s a lot of nuance in the arrangements and production. Is it a novelty? Yes. Is it also awesome? Again, yes.
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Quivers – Oyster Cuts (Merge)
Strong songwriting highlights this Melbourne band’s first album for Merge
While Melbourne, Australia has become known for gritty garage punk (Total Control, Amyl, etc etc etc), the city has a long lineage of ernest, jangly, hooky, anthemic indie rock and there are still practitioners of that living there. Prime among them are Quivers who just released their fourth album which is also their first for Merge, a label that has always had a soft spot for guitar pop from Australia (and New Zealand). Oyster Cuts is a record that could’ve come out any time in the last 40 years (except for the song that quotes Pavement, that could’ve come out any time in the last 30 years). They add keyboards to their arsenal this time which are deployed sparingly but add welcome textures to “Oyster Cuts” and the lovely, melancholic “Grief Has Feathers.” They do let things rip a few times, like on the Stonesy “Apparition,” but in general Quivers favor songcraft and subtlety over flash and I’m all for that.
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