Song reviews

On the third day or thereabouts God invented the guitar and shortly thereafter blues rock was borne. The Blue Poets are therefore as old school as you can get – their song “Goodbye” even has a guitar solo – and yet the robust vocals and four on the floor virtuosity make them as welcome as they would have been in 1975.

Einar Vilberg certainly knows how to make a song to escape from your headphones with “Apathy” scaling upwards and outwards to make a fine example of American influenced, testosterone powered melancholy.

Endearingly hypnotic, Ronley Teper and Her Lipliners go all little girl blue with their song “Faith” and, whilst leaving plenty of space for both piano and her plaintive vocals, take us to the crescendo that inevitably collides with redemption.

Curiously upbeat and optimistic for a Scottish band of these dull and dreary times, Jargo strikes a nice balance between lyrical sentimentality and the sing along guitar pop groove with “Photograph The Feeling” therefore easily justifying its place on the summer playlist.

An odd one this. There is a pleasing quirkiness to Maisie Hutt’s voice and the lyrics take a welcome walk away from the dancefloor but the derivative and yet still clumsy electropop backing track that powers “Eight Till Ten” undoes all that is good here.

Although nearly drowning in a sea of musical reverence, “Break of Dawn” is nonetheless the kind of robust song that might well be seen as stadium friendly but let us not forget that it is Mudibu’s soulful vocals that actually gets the song on to the safety of the shore

Whilst “Voodoo” isn’t the kind of song to trouble your memory, you can’t deny the style and presence that Beth Macari brings to the party and she duly makes more of this song than many could. I’m sure the smart money will be watching out for whatever she does next.

“Younger Mind” might well sound like the product of a bygone age – in this case eighties electro pop – yet Sykes with the mix of those analogue synth sounds, rockstar guitar and Julia Sykes’ almost wistful voice make the song sound as fresh as today’s bread.

Emma Essinger strays away from the conventional with her song “Bang Bang” having enough oddball elements to lift it out of the Scandinavian electropop groove and into the hearts of those who appreciate something a bit different.

Balancing robotically precise percussion with the casual indifference of Kirsten Clark’s voice works out well for Canadian band Babygirl with “Overbored” successfully evoking the calm after the emotional storm and, whilst not an uplifting song, it does nonetheless have a certain hypnotic quality.

Superglu would seem to be the kind of band that like to kick it up old style with their song “Weekend” featuring the kind of roughhouse guitars and aim at the wall vocals that inevitably make for the soundtrack to a good night out

While there are still a few, no doubt deliberately applied, rough edges to “Social Politics”, London all girl band Yassassin demonstrate that there is still life in smoothing out the post punk ethos and applying it to the kind of pop song that could only have been born in a garage.