I don’t really do reviews-on-request any more. Except when I get a very nice email, like that one Mattias, who runs Cosy Recordings, sent me a couple of weeks ago, which contained two CDs-converted-to-mp3s.

After-school Sports is Alice from Stockholm (she is/was also in The Never Invited To Parties and Strawberry Fair) who does the girl that is probably so shy that no one cared to talk to her at school, but now makes great music in her bedroom-kind of electornic indiepop. Sweet, subtle and soothing. A bit like Action Biker and a bit more like Bobby Baby. There are nine songs on A short melodrama, most of which I really like, with Smile being my favourite. That’s actually a cover of a Lily Allen-song, but you knew that, as you, unlike me, follow the charts and read hipster blogs.

Johan Hedberg (Mark 5:37) is a suburban kid with a biblical name (and, apparently, namesake of a professional ice hockey player) and sounds like one would expect a SKWBN-going-electronic solo project to sound like: quite singer-songwriter-ish for an electronic act. Except that he sings in Swedish. It’s a lot less introvert than After-school Sports, which, for that reason, I prefer better, but it’s definitely not bad either and has its interesting moments.

The label, by the way, is related to a Gothenburg club night and has a blog too.

One of the good sides to spending half my days in Oxon is that if I don’t come down to Devon but we spend the weekend in London instead, it hardly costs us any extra money.

So we went to a Sinister picnic on Saturday. I never was on Sinister. Shame on me, really, but no one ever told me about it, and I think that counts as a half-valid excuse. Dimitra was though, so I attended my first picnic –celebrating ten years of the mailing list– as a husband-of. Well, so I felt at first and I went around awkwardly telling people about how ‘I was never in Sinister, but …’

But actually, there were quite a few people I had met before, most notably Joe, who we had manage to convince to play some songs on his guitar, and Tim, who made life so much easier and cheaper (and more fun, too), by letting us stay in his South-London flat. And I saw some people I had never met before, like Kris, who is really nice and as dedicated a pop fan as he appears through his blogs, and two people from Tales of Jenny. They remembered I had written something nice about them two years ago, which always makes me feel slightly uncomfortable as hey, I didn’t write that because I am a very nice person who spends his time writing nice things about bands on his blog, I wrote that because I genuinely thought (and still think) that these songs were totally brilliant. But then, they’re Tales of Jenny, so I couldn’t really have minded anything they said.

And it was summer, too: twenty-something degrees and t-shirt weather. And Primrose Hill is such a superb location, with views over most of the town and surprisingly quiet given its relatively central location. They probably don’t write about it in these tourist guides, but it almost beats the Thames banks.

Yes, I do like Devon, and yes, I am glad we live in a quiet town where life gives you time to think and where you can reach the town centre on foot, but still, it’s great to be in London every now and again.

(I also thought once again that grass is really greener in England, but then I noticed that everyone who had spent their afternoon on the hill threw away their food before they left. When the rubbish bins got full, they just put it in plastic bags next to them, rather than using that as an excuse to leave their stuff behind. If you’re English, you can –and should– be proud of that.)

We’ll spend another weekend in London, so instead of rushing to Radley station and spending a couple of hours in packed FGW-trains, I am… well, right now I’m doing not very much actually, apart from sitting at my breadcrumb-covered-desk killing time until the bus will take this boy back to his tiny Wootton-room.

So I may as well point you to a couple of really good songs out there on that interweb-thingie.

The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Dreaming is a Television Personalities song from 1999 that Chris posted almost two months ago. The song isn’t very obscure, but new to me nevertheless and shows once more what a genius Dan Treacy is. Well, as the wise words at Fire Escape Talking show, only when it comes to songwriting.

Said blog then posted When The Boy’s Happy (The Girl’s Happy Too) by the Four Pennies, which is another proof of the fact that all those drug-taking hippies did in the 1960s was taking away the attention from several much better bands.

Cardiff’s The School combine sweet girlpop (if there’s such a thing) with the melancholy of Camera Obscura and might be my favourite new band of the moment. Those two songs on last.fm as my favourites, but MySpace has a couple more.

Constance Verluca’s C’est Faux might be the best fille sourire I heard recently.

And finally, fellow West-Countrian-working-from-home Simon wrote a song about his (almost) former flatmate under his moniker La Famille Catastrophe.

There were some people dancing to Jens Lekman during the last Exeter Goes Pop! Old people, even. Or so I was told, as I didn’t notice it myself. Sadly enough, they were only in the bar area for a couple of minutes during the break of the theatre show they were attending. But that’s alright, as we have reconciled ourselves to the idea that the monthly club night is just a nice opportunity to talk to each other while showing off our record collections.

Last week, I managed to squeeze The Cupons in our play list, and for me that on its own made the evening worth the bus journey.

It doesn’t happen very often any more, now with the interweb and all that, that there is literally no information available on a band. It is the case with the Cupons though. I can’t even be sure about the band’s name, as I’ve seen websites that refer to them as The Coupons. In any case, all of these sites talk about the second edition of the Girls in the Garage compilation series, on which they have a song called Turn Her Down. So the band must be a girl group from the 1960s, but that is pretty clear from the music itself anyway: it’s that kind of innocent and honest pop song that disappeared after the appearance of the prog of the 1970s and got reinvented in indiepop. Which I’m mostly just saying to make a point. Which is that this song is totally bloody smashing ace.

Proof:

The Cupons – Turn Her Down

A 2005 survey stated that 47% of all blog posts consisted of nothing more than links to other blogs. Okay, I just made this up, but anyway:

And then suddenly is a blog from Sweden (which, come to think of it, is quite underblogged given that one in three young Swedes seems to possess a Tullycraft-t-shirt) and a continuation of the late Dance To The Sun. Not that a blog which starts with posting a Cat’s Miaow song can be bad, but judging from the mp3s with lyrics and personal stories, it looks like this will be a true addition to the blogosphere.

Hey hey honeypop! is the public diary of Marianthi, who is involved in Spiral Scratch and Atomic Beat and whose heart even beats pop tunes.

I don’t blog is Polish-turned-Scottish Ola, who does blog after all. Or perhaps she doesn’t, but she draws about her life, which is at least as good. If not better.

Do something pretty is Dutch, but since it mostly posts nice things to look at, this shouldn’t get in your way of getting as happy from ‘reading’ it as I do.

Bearsuit is playing in Exeter tonight. They’re part of an Indie Club, so the poster also contains some names of bands that the DJ will spin afterwards. Of which I remember the Arctic Monkeys… I suppose I now know what a devout Christian feels when some semi-retarded president uses their belief to start a useless war.

But if we ignore my indiepop-snobbism, the message ‘Bearsuit is playing in Exeter tonight’ still holds, of course. It’s at the Cavern and –if you make it there before eight– it’s free as well.

Bearsuit – On Your Special Day
Bearsuit – Hei Joska Hei Jokunen

(We will probably have our purgatorial period before indiepop heaven extended by not going. Because we were tired. And because we wanted to spend a quiet evening at home. And, mostly, because we’re getting old.)

There will be a new Club 8 album, out next month and it will be christened The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Dreaming. Which, incidentally (or not?), is also the title of a Television Personalities song that I didn’t know, until Chris posted it, well, quite a while ago actually. And which is damn brilliant.

There is also a new album by My Little Airport, out on Elefant (out since spring, but I miss out on such things these days), which might give the Hong Kong based twee pop duo some exposure in the West. They always manage to put a smile on my face, so that’d only be right. The album is called Zoo is sad, people are cruel and it seems to mostly contain songs that had already featured their Asian releases, like Edward, had you ever thought that the end of the world would come on 20.9.01, Victor Fly Me To Stafford and the brilliant-and-short Gigi Leung is dead.

My Little Airport – Gigi Leung Is Dead

Not sure if we’re going to play any of those tonight at the seventh Exeter Goes Pop!, but you could always come and request it. We’re nice people, so we might fulfil the request. Music will be played, roughly, between eight and eleven and it’s at the Phoenix. And it’s free as well.

  ‘Take a look around
  Seems we cast away the clouds
  To which we once were bound
  Take this day and run
  Our season has begun.’

The sky is grey above Oxfordshire. Dimitra had come over for the night and she too thought that Oxon is a lot more grey than Devon. Which just makes me happy our home, our real home, is in Devon and not here. And it makes me long for that same Devon, too. But right now I don’t mind the rain and the clouds. Right now I’m just dreamily sitting behind the computer and thinking of last night.

I always thought that, of all Rose Melberg’s bands, I liked Tiger Trap best. I’m not sure any more. I saw Rose in London on Friday and then again in Oxford last night (which, of course, is why Dimitra had come down) and I doubt if her other bands would have been able to outclass this week’s performances. Well, they definitely wouldn’t have been able to beat that moment last night, when she played Cast Away The Clouds, the title track of her solo album. Dimitra used to play the album a lot last summer, and I always thought it was a rather sad song, but that probably was mostly due to the personal mess I was in back then. Last night, in the attic of an Oxford pub, and the constant realisation that things in life are getting better, I decided it was the most beautiful song ever written. (Which, of course, I will say about another song, another day. But that’s just besides the point right now.)

Oh, Gregory Webster played too. Which was good, too, but then, he is Gregory Webster after all. Especially the two Razorcuts songs he played and the Carousel-song with Rose and her friend on vocals were quite stunning. It’s been more than five years since I’ve last seen his latest band Sportique and although I had kind of given up on seeing a lot of bands, I wouldn’t mind seeing them again.

But this is what matters now:

Rose Melberg – Cast Away The Clouds

(That link goes to box.net, which, I think, is the best place to host mp3s. Thanks to Dimitra for sending me the mp3, to TV Casualty for putting the lyrics online, to Spiral Scratch and Swiss Concrete for putting up the shows in London and Oxford respectively and to Double Agent and Where It’s At Is Where You Are for releasing Rose’s record. Which, I think, you should buy.)

Dimitra tagged me. And since the bible, the qur’an, the torah and Harry Potter all say that one should listen to their wife, what can I do than fulfil her request and write eight things about myself? It’s a good excuse for some tidy-up-blogging anyway.

1. We were in London on Saturday, to see gigs by Harvey Williams and Rose Melberg. I enjoyed being there, especially seeing Rose was quite a lovely experience. We also saw many friends and heroes, and perhaps some heroes turned friends too. But because of that, the whole event was all rather overwhelming and I might have embarrassed myself slightly towards some fellow bloggers when I had no idea they have actually been reading this blog.

2. I recently read Jonathan Coe’s The Rain Before It Falls. I had always meant to read something, if not everything, by the bloke –I even started in What A Carve Up! once, but then book and reader were in a different country for a month, so I gave up– and now I want to read his other books even more. Apparently, the book isn’t out yet. Why we still managed to buy it from the bookshop at Amsterdam Airport, I have no idea.

3. I think that Trembling Blue Stars‘ Idyllwild is, by far, the best song of this year. Which I feel kind of bad for thinking, as everything in the song sounds like the sort of thing I would love anyway, but it’s still true. Here is a Croatian (?) blog that has an mp3 of the song.

4. About a month ago, I peeked through the gates of St James Park for a couple of minutes again, to see Exeter City play a friendly against Norwich City. Exeter won by 2-1, which was quite a shock, since Norwich plays three divisions higher. Two weeks later, I ran into the full Norwich City squad at Amsterdam Airport. I could not think fast enough of a clever remark though. In the meantime, Exeter have trashed Altringham and are currently leading their league.

5. I have not had access to the vast majority of my records for more than a year now. And I don’t really mind. I do mind that I used to spend so many years collecting them, only to discover that I don’t care about them all that much after all.

6. All ILX-forums have be moved back to their old addresses. This includes the Subjectivisten forum. You don’t care, probably, but I was asked to spread the word. (I’ve wasted spent at least a year of my life on said forum, so it is about me.)

7. Between the age of 18 and 22 (and perhaps even until I was 26) I never really thought. I mean, I did think, I was doing abstract maths aftert all, but I never really thought about things that mattered. And it wasn’t even that things were so easy, or so great; they weren’t. I was just myself too busy going on with doing the same things to really think. And if there’s anything in my life I regret, it is that.

8. I don’t go around with this kind of lists in my head, not any more at least, but I think I can’t but say that Belle & Sebastian’s If Your Feeling Sinister is my favourite record. Ever. But –and this is definitely related to the previous point– as a record it never meant very much to me. Which is rather sad, I think.

(I think I’m supposed to tag eight others now. Well, there you go, eight fellow bloggers who’ve read this and who haven’t been tagged yet: go ahead!)

…and it’s not even us. Next Saturday, the 18th, Bearsuit will play for free, while on the last day of October, Los Campesinos (as well as You say party! We say die!) will play for a small fee. Both gigs are in The Cavern. Now I do think there are a 100 reasons why the Phoenix is a much better place to spend your nights (99 perhaps, now that the Cavern is smoke-free by law), but still, it seems both are worth going.

In other music news –and speaking of bands that defnitely should play Devon, even if it was on our tiny balcony– there will be 45-song double CD compilation by The Lucksmiths out very soon.

And since Chris has sent his superb The Rain Fell Down to blog-heaven, I should say a final Thank You for all those brilliant posts and radio shows, but also point you to his new blog Heaven Is Above Your Head.

I took the bus from Abingdon to Didcot, which was fifteen minutes delayed. That’s too much to catch my train to Bristol, but luckily that one had a seven minutes delay too, so I caught it after all. The connection in Bristol is the worst possible, so I still had to wait almost fifty minutes for my train to Exeter. Which left on time, but had to wait outside Exeter for a couple of minutes, during which the Exmouth bound train had departed. So had the bus, and when I was in the next train –an hour later– it didn’t leave on time. It was waiting for a slightly delayed train from Bristol…

I was once told I look like Harvey Williams. I think I don’t, at least not very much, but still it was nice to hear that. He’s a bit of a hero of mine, after all, and a fellow West-Countrian too. I’ve been told I look like Art Garfunkel too, but that was before I wore glasses. Anyway, Harvey is playing at the Luminaire in London, in a little over a week. So is Rose Melberg. It’s those Spiral Scratch people again. We’re going there too. Except we haven’t bought our tickets yet or found a place to stay. I keep putting it off, I think subconsciously because I keep hoping for someone suddenly offering us a truckload of money and book us a nice hotel. So far no one has. If one doesn’t count the son of the late king Sani Abakaliki of Nigeria, that is. Nevertheless, if you know of a not-so-expensive, not-so-cheap-looking and not-too-far-from-the-Luminaire place to stay, feel free to use the comment box below. If you don’t, but still feel like saying hi next week, you’re welcome too. Just look for Harvey Williams. If then there’s a bloke on the stage, playing songs, and ‘Harvey’ is still standing among the audience, then say hi to ‘Harvey’. It’s probably me.

  ‘Every song that I listen to, was written for you.’

I have a cd by Cambridge’s Roadside Poppies, which is both really good and still in Devon. Which then is both pretty bad grammar and rather stupid, as the cd is really good. Well, I just said that, but I mean, it is really really good. Cycling and Crying, which is the first track and the title-song, is the kind of song that seems to be written especially for me to like it: happy, sweet, a little bit sad, and a bit silly too. And the eight letters of ‘indiepop’ painted all over the song. Actually, the whole EP is pretty good, with the note that I, just like Tom, like their true indiepop side the best.

If you, unlike me at this moment, are using a computer that has sound enabled, you could stream the whole EP on last.fm. But even so, you’d better get hold of the thing yourself, as the people at WeePOP! have packed it as a nice 3&dquot; cd in a paper envelope. Very much like the I Wish I Was Unpopular-releases. The label have done another release too, which I also have, but I liked the Roadside Poppies one so much that I haven’t given it a proper listen yet…