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Louis XIV - The
Best Little Secrets Are Kept
With their eye-liner,
skinny ties and dodgy mullets Louis XIV look as though they've come straight from
the 80s. They're the quirky side to The Killers and The Bravery. They
might be from San Diego but there's a definite Englishness to their sound and
a beautiful stab of un-PC lyrics that'll have the Daily Mail spitting feathers.
Just listen to Finding Out True Love Is Blind where singer Jason Hill comes over
all Iggy Pop. Elsewhere there are hints of Bowie,
T-Rex and the Stones. It's a short sharp ball of fun, all at under 40 minutes…just
like it was in the 80s.
4/5  The
Crimea - Tragedy Rocks
This band has a lot to live up to - in their independent
days the single Baby Boom (included here) was in John Peel's final Top 10 Festive
Fifty (2003).
Describing The Crimea's sound isn't
easy. The opening thirty seconds of White Russian Galaxy sounds like it's going
to turn into a symphony before it abruptly stops and begins again in normal song
format. There are shades of Flaming Lips / Grandaddy
/ Waterboys and Gregg Alexander in there and song titles like Lottery Winners
On Acid and The Miserabilist Tango show the band's leader Davey MacManus has a
sense of humour. The fear is Tragedy Rocks might
be too clever for its own good and therefore struggle to cross over to the mainstream.
3.5/5 | 
