Low-key supergroup Railcard are an indie pop lover’s dream ensemble. Not only does Rachel Love of the incredibly influential 80’s guitar pop band Dolly Mixture play guitar and singer, Ian Button of the criminally overlooked Papernut Cambridge plays drums and sings, and Peter Momtchiloff — legendary guitarist of Tallulah Gosh and Heavenly — holds down the bass job. Add in trumpeter/keyboardist Rachel Bennett, who has played with the brilliant Trash Can Sinatras, and it’s almost too much. How could a group with such an impressive CV live up to the expectations? Without a problem judging by the string of lovely EPs that incorporated Northern Soul, girl groups, and space age bachelorette pad music into the charmingly sweet melodies and chiming guitars.
Tag Archive: Slumberland
The name was an explicit signpost. Maryland’s Velocity Girl named themselves after the B-side of Primal Scream’s May 1986 second single “Crystal Crescent.” At this point, Bobby Gillespie and Co were still a Byrds-leaning, Sixties-inclined, polkadotted jangly pop outfit. There were no hints of what came later.
Velocity Girl formed in College Park, Maryland in 1989 but were embedded in the Washington, DC music scene – one which, for much of the outside world, was defined by hardcore punk and the various flavours springing from it represented by bands like Fugazi and Nation of Ulysses. Looking to any British indie archetype was atypical. As the liner notes for new compilation 1989-1992 put it, “Velocity Girl arose from a new…
There are inherent pitfalls for a band when they set about recreating a sound from the past with exacting precision. It’s far too easy for their work to sound like a hollow pastiche if they don’t play with undeniable energy or come up with a brilliant batch of songs. On their second album Was It Always This Way, Real Numbers do everything they can to sound exactly like a band who would have recorded for Sarah Records in 1989. Except for when they sound like they wanted to be signed to Creation in 1986. The order of the day is echoing guitar jangle, vocals that express powerful amounts of melancholy, synths that moan like faraway ghosts, and a rhythm section that sound like they studied every move the Cure made in the early ’80s. They have the sound down dead to…
Between their 2021 debut full-length In This Town and 2025’s Whispers in the Speed Machine, Ohio band The Laughing Chimes moved from a shiny, jangly type of pop into slightly darker waters by adding a post-punk edge to their sound. Between these two albums, however, the band was working on new material that was a little closer to the sunny pop of their earlier work, demo’ing song ideas on cassette four-track.
Behind Your Blue Fields collects some of these lo-fi sketches from this in-between period, offering documentation of their development from the vantage point of insulated home recordings and exploring what it might have been like if these happier songs had been worked through to completion for their second album.
The lads and lasses of Autocamper have clearly done their homework, studying the greats of indie pop — the noisy bands of C86, the jangling bands of Sarah Records, the laconic indie rockers of early 90s America, and seemingly every important group (the Pastels, Belle & Sebastian, Camera Obscura, the Vaselines, etc.) to hail from Scotland — with their noses buried deep in the books and never allowing anything to distract them from absorbing knowledge. The result of all this hard work and dedication is a passing grade for their debut album What Do You Do All Day? There are enough pleasant melodies and sharply poppy hooks to fill a giant size lunch box, the band crank them out like they were second nature. The lineup is the classic guitar-bass-drums with vintage…
When Allo Darlin’ called it quits in 2016, (onetime Tender Trap member) Elizabeth Morris and band had released three remarkably consistent, critically acclaimed albums within five years — their alternately bouncy and melancholy songs, tuneful melodies, and earnest, untrained vocals were quintessential of the indie pop style. After getting back in touch via Zoom calls while sheltering from COVID-19 in the early 2020s, the London quartet officially reunited in 2023 for a pair of U.K. shows that sold out in minutes. They went on to write and record Bright Nights, their fourth album and first in 11 years. Drawing on emotional experiences from the preceding ten years, the LP may be a bit more reflective in nature than their previous releases, but fans can take heart that it’s…