Primal Casualties of the Fizzbomb Purgatory,

Sometimes the marketing of bands and music works and even the ardent anti-capitalists can fall for a well-planned strategy.

The Little Ones are a lovely pop band. If I can compare strike an analogy with Suffolk’s Rendlesham Forest UFO incident of 1980 that would make the tale of how I came to buy the record Sing Song slightly less (or more) dull. The single Lovers Who Uncover came onto my radar when it was played on Radio Double One’s Mark Radcliffe programme. I paid little more attention to them, it was a fairly pleasant pop record but then more reported sightings of something quite unusual came in and men (eyeballs) were scrambled to MySpace where they saw songs that were better than the usual fare. They gawked at what they saw for a while, went home and forgot about it. A while later, The Little Ones came back, with a single, sessions on 6music’s Tom Robinson Show and Radio Double One’s Mark Radcliffe Show and the serious tactical leaders had to see what strange things were happening in the forest, what they saw was startling. The next morning they filed a report to Fopp and a cover-up in a carrier bag followed, before an expose in the car CD player seemed to bring the details of what happened to light. In all seriousness, Sing Song features 7 songs, each could be excellent pop singles. Oh, MJ! grabs me, it’s the radioactive emitter at the site. I thought this was excellent value at £6, it might be called a mini-album too, but again I’d argue that there’s no point in filling a record with duffers just to obey convention.

A different marketing plot led to me purchasing All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone by Explosions in the Sky. I love Bella Union, there are hardly any rotten acts on that record label. My Latest Novel, Midlake, Fionn Regan, Robert Gomez and to a lesser extent, The Dears are all great in my opinion. I’ve even taken to The Kissaway Trail, their latest signing, immediately. For a few weeks now, Bella Union have bombarded me with emithers and I succumbed; I had not heard of them, I didn’t even look them up on MySpace, but I was sure I could not make a mistake with a Bella Union artist, after all, they weren’t Howling Bells. I stuck the CD on whilst sat studeing. I could not work, I ended up marvelling at the beauty of this. I was caught up in the wistfulness, the thoughtfulness and the action. It is all instrumental. The trick is to imagine how the music fits around whatever the title suggests - it’s like drama lessons at primary school (pretend that you are an acorn) – The Birth and Death of the Day or Catastrophe and the Cure are prime examples of drama in the titles of the compositions. There’s definitely more than enough room on my shelf for this alongside Mogwai, 65daysofstatic and the recently reviewed Aereogramme because this is stunning. The artwork by Estaban Rey is also quite brilliant and entirely fitting.

The Bellyaches has never given mp3s away, mostly because the act of doing so is too technical but I’ll point the readership in the direction of the South by Southwest Festival website where there are various mp3s of some of the artists to listen to and download.