The Jade Assembly - Our Town

Our Town - a big, sonorous anthem the likes of The Doves would be proud to call their own; The Jade Assembly's latest single is exactly the kind of solid rock track that restores your faith in the British indie scene. The band, made up of Foz, Andy, Matt and Smedo talk on their website about crafting songs of honesty and 'an imposing sense of belief'. And belief they have in bucket-loads - carved into the very essence of their sound is a real grit and determination (helped along a good deal by the raw, Northern accents).

The choruses  resound with a real sense of scale, a harking back to the days when Brit-rock heroes The Stereophonics and Manic Street Preachers ruled the airwaves. This is music that soars and glides above the masses, blazing a trail in their wake.

There's a line half-way through; 'We're Bolton Boys until the day we die', and it just serves to re-inforce the fact that Our Town is every inch a future soundtrack to Match of The Day; even the title full of a sense of pride and passion for one's home.

Our Town is available as a free download from the band's website - http://www.thejadeassembly.co.uk/

Jimmy And The Sounds - Little Victories

Four-piece Jimmy and the Sounds have been making a bit of a name for themselves recently, supporting the likes of Maximo Park and British Sea Power at festival dates across the UK. And now comes new single Little Victories; a big, joyous slice of good, old fashioned Brit-Pop. The verses are very Doves whereas the choruses tend more towards recent indie trends, carrying with them the swagger and impassioned vocals of bands like The Enemy. It's radio friendly to the max, the kind of track that Radio 1 would eat up - yet with the punch and an edge of roughness that lets it stand up in its own right too. With songs like these, Jimmy and the Sounds aren't content to merely slot neatly alongside their contemporaries, they're here to stand out from the crowd, to mark their own place out in the swirling seas of indie rock.

Part of the charm is the emotion - so often bands will rush through the motions with tracks that are hollow and dry. But Little Victories is brimming with a radiance of emotion and feeling; it's a song all about taking chances and living each day to its full. Hailing from the North East, the band carry every inch of their heritage with them. This is about hard work and talent winning out against hardship; big and anthemic, it seem ready-made to soundtrack the festival season... or Match of the Day. Either way, it's exactly the kind of track to inject some much needed passion and pop sensibility into the tired indie market.

Little Victories is released on the 30th May.

Bikini Test Failure - Fleecing The Easily Pleased

Some days I wish I could go back to the 90s. There was just a real special-something about the decade; maybe a little rough around the edges at times, but always enfused with that sheer joy of life. And Bikini Test Failure’s album Fleecing The Easily Pleased is full to the brim of that feeling, so much so that the first track is rather cheerily titled Yes, We Are Having A Good Time Now. The songs here are pure Blur and Lightning Seeds; packed with that anthemic sense of energy, pride and happiness. Jangly guitars and elegant touches of synths polish the sound off, front-man James’s vocals coming across like a modern-day Damon Albarn.

Tracks like Missing A Gene come across more like Oasis in one of their more gentle moments, full of that Brit-pop swagger. Bikini Test Failure’s real strength is recapturing that lost sound, revitalising it and unleashing it in a whole new era. It’s old sounds, but with new innovation – the album being remarkably consistent, keeping a flowing sense of continuity from end to start with nothing that ever really jars the listener. There’s a cutesy, quaint British-ness to all the tracks; a pretty home-made quality to tracks like Falling Apart that stands as a perfect counterpoint to the grander moments elsewhere on the album.

There’s even touches of Doves to their sound too, and hailing from Manchester too, there’s a real sense of the musical legacy of that great Northern city here. With soaring, radio-friendly choruses and a real sense of musicianship to the songs here, Fleecing The Easily Pleased, is an album that impresses from first listen and is sure to delight fans of the best in British alternative guitar music everywhere.