Occasionally I get sent mail from bands who want me to review their stuff, or embed their video or say nice things about them for some reason. I don’t often do it because on the whole, they are depressingly boring.

But yesterday I got an email that contained this…

We made the video ourselves and it’s basically a battle between a robot and a wizard (homemade costumes). In the video there are fireballs, russian roulette, sword fights, massages, a dog with a cape, breakfast etc…..

It’s actually pretty badass!

And I knew I was onto a winner. I love the fact that they follow ‘a dog with a cape, breakfast’ with ‘etc’ – Yeah, that’s right you know, dogs with capes, early morning meals, the usual, you can sort of guess what’s next… Brilliant.

This came from a genuinely delightful indie pop band Hotel St. George

I checked out the video. It did indeed include all the aforementioned stuff and defiantly rates as ‘badass’ The video reminds me of staying up til 3AM watching videos on MTV2 to try and find something new to impress my friends with.

Which is good.

Tonight’s sparse crowd isn’t helped by The Lexington’s weird décor – a mix of Auntie Mabel wallpaper and Bowells of a Steam Ship that still manages to boast a decent stage area and a thunderous PA playing Devo –certainly enough to engage our hipster radars from the get-go.

Plenty of pre-gig buggering about on our part means we miss openers Grave Architects, (but check ‘em out here anyway!) so are initially put in a bad mood by the trying too hard indie antics of Lost Infantry.
First rule of stagecraft: Treat the audience like the dogs they are. They aren’t interested in your in-jokes and self effacing banter. Second rule? Well, not mixing Yes guitar lines with a Dexy’s influence is probably a good one…

The trouble with LI is they just try too hard. Decent musicianship is hidden behind unnecessary tub-thumping, while a love of 80s Bowie causes several uneven time changes that tear apart the shouty choruses. Unsure if they want to be ColdPlay or the Ordinary Boys, the band practice spaz dancing, overly sincere emoting and swop songwriting for hairstyles.

Next up it’s Danish export Bodebrixen, and watching them set up fills DT with deep worry. They wear the type of skinny jeans that give you a deformed package and matching stripy tops that seem to have crawled in pissed from Vice Magazine’s Do’s and Don’ts column. The bass player (what is it with bass players? Lemmy never had this problem) sports matching red cardigan and socks –and no shoes, while white jeans with turn-ups have us heading for the bar to avoid the inevitable simpering Euro-emo.

We needn’t have worried.

While they conform to every Scando stereotype in the book, Bodebrixen pull of some of the cleverest, most joyous indie on the planet. Parping keyboards and lush vocal harmonies mean they come off like every funny memory of Eurovision you ever had with just a touch of Magic Numbers feelgoodosity bunged in for good measure. There are balloons, there is confetti – there’s even something resembling a lunch break, but it takes genuine talent to play a set that incorporates whistling, humming, whoa-whoa’s and happy clapping and still seem cool.

Childish and whimsical but undeniably fun, grin inducing songs and amusing Uropee-an intros “This next song used to be a Christmas song…but its not a Christmas song anymore” may be put on but add to the performance A tambourine crown of thorns and hints of Paris jazz – albeit filtered through a 1982 Casiotone – mean Bodebrixen are onto a winner with their parping pop anthems that remain crass but resolutely inoffensive in the best possible sense, the perfect soundtrack to a prawn cocktail and Kiev dinner party.

Google is all powerful! It knows who you are, where you live and what you watch when you’re jerking off. Luckily there’s still a way for rock n’ roll to stick it to the man – even a man that will happily make naked ladies appear on your screen whenever you like – form a band even the big G can’t track down! DT ignores the spellcheck and checks ‘em out:

1: The Band.

The masters of post-modern irony. It’s fairly obvious these days that Bob Dylan is an alien time traveller, which explains how, despite dying before the spread of the internet, Richard Manuel managed to utterly confound the combined powers of Google and..erm..Ask Jeeves..with this name, which returns just about every MySpace page on the planet. Good work alien Bob!.

2: !!!

Sacramento, California, has it’s fair share of funk/dance/post-punk ensembles, all dying to get talked about. Unfortunately !!! seem to have chosen their name based on the sound their maternal grandmother made upon finding porn in their bedroom.

3: MP3

A brilliant name unfortunately hoovered up for use by some bloody politicians -Members of Parliament… and there’s three of them..do you see what they did there? Do you get it? How we laughed at the DT office as we spent 3 straight hours trying to find a website almost as elusive as D.A.D’s  (before realising we could find them on wiki. Strangely, they recently changed the name to MP4, which made sense with the extra member, but must have halved the number of hits these guys were getting.

4: Torrent.

It seems like a great name doesn’t it? It’s fresh and modern sounding, with a bit of an edge, some meaning behind the name. Until one of your fans wants to know more, and is faced with 248,000,000 results, most of them for knocked off copies of The Wedding Crashers. Not helped by that terribly familiar logo..

5: James.

Luckily no one in their right mind would bother searching for the baldy Manchester egomaniacs, but try googling them – or indeed their hit Sit Down – and see what you get: More adverts for beanbags and office furniture than you can shake a lazy Madchester shoegazer at.

6: Sunn0)))))))

A bit of an anomaly here, as the titans of drone doom can actually be googled. What they can’t be however, is downloaded. Go to BT or Kazaa or whatever –try typing that name in. It can’t be done! So underground they refuse to believe anyone would be able to share their music – probably because they record it on wax cylinders.

7: 404 Forbidden

A band so difficult to find, that after an hour of looking for a picture, I though “ah fuck ‘em” and instead used an image of Bay Area Thrashers Forbidden (Partially because I vaguely resemble singer russ)! 404 encapsulate the frustrations of legions of garage band users, as evidenced by similarly named associates 403 and 405. Face it Casio-centric noisecore-ists everywhere, you’d be better off with a moog.

8: A!

Proof positive that the Aaron A. Aardvark trick may mean you’re first on the shelves in HMV, but when the entire music marketing game changes overnight, you’re fucked. It also doesn’t help that A! are fucking awful.

Any more? Send ‘em in and undermine their undergroundness!

Probably the defining American indie band of the 90’s – Pavement – have reformed to play a gig in Central Park in 2010.

Pavement released a string of albums through the 90’s that formed the soundtrack to tight t shirts, roll up cigarettes, fanzines and dancing while looking at your own feet. Good to have them back. Let’s hope their fans leave the tight t shirts in the cupboard though.

What you see above is a band who are either very, very clever or monumentally thick. Thick to the point of non-functional. So thick, in fact, that they cease to function as normal humans and simply begin to mill around making grunting noises, dribbling and, in this lots’ case, styling their hair.

They are a band called Raygun. Unheard of until today when this video started doing the rounds on the blogosphere – cheers Popjustice – the hilarity is derived from the plummy public school accents spouting self-assured guff about their utterly bog standard musical output. They are, in their own words:

Iggy Pop, James Brown, David Bowie and Shirley Bassey in a lift

High praise indeed. Well it would be if it hadn’t come from their own eye-linered, smug faces.

The highlight of the video comes I think when the singer spouts this stream of twaddle, ending on a high note.

Be at home, knocking up some beats on Reason or Logic or Ableton or whatever… and then we kind of get together and mash two types of songs, a hybrid of style really. Delia Smith. Psychedelia Smith.

Psychedelia Smith. A contrived phrase so monolithicaly wanky, even one-note punchline Nathan Barley would feel ashamed for using it.

Either this is a highpoint in viral marketing for a clever band, playing the media to get coverage, or a group of cock-ends coddled by industry insiders into believing their own hype and sniffing each others farts.

The takedown notice by management on the original video makes me think it’s the latter.

Puck are obviously a band who have worked hard on their sound, for a demo this is super slick with a solid, clear production that showcases frontlady AmyJay’s soaring vocals. If anything however, this could be as much a problem as a bonus. Things start promisingly enough, with a chunky, stonery riff introducing opener”Fly”. Once those vocals kick in however, the heavy edge quickly rubs off. I’ve mentioned the slick production, and combined with the high end vox there’s a definite touch of 80s and early 90s rock to this, Heart and Vixen springing to mind (and bizarrely, the fictional Tia Carrera fronted band from “Wayne’s World”!).

While the band are all good musicians there’s a certain lack of direction, and a slightly dated approach to songwriting that could hinder the band’s commercial success (I could of course be completely wrong, and they may conquer the US market the way groups like Train have previously- never underestimate the power of MOR), likewise the vocals are excellent, but perhaps a little too sweet, giving proceedings a definite touch of the Miley Sirus-es. Final track “All We Got” does try to update things with an angular, jumpy verse that hints at Arctic Monkeys, but then the huge 80s chorus turns the whole thing into “I’m Still Standing”-lite (If you can imagine such a thing).

Overall shows a great deal of promise and if reviews by the likes of PowerPlay and HardRockHouse are anything to go by, knows its audience perfectly, but a sense of direction and some updating are needed if they want to avoid living next to Asia in the melodic hard rock ghetto.

Puck Official Website