Runaround Kids - You'd Feel The Same

Sit down for this. The first new material since the spiky Wakefield trio's STN number 19 of 2011 album is being released as a T-shirt plus free CDR (ah, the value of recorded music). A special bundle deal via Bandcamp means you'll also be on the mailout for a forthcoming 12" split single with We Are Losers, a cassette with The Spills and a compilation CD with those tracks plus more, as well as badges, stickers, scans and whatever else fits into an envelope. None of this would be any good without a halfway decent song to front the whole extended project up and it is, exploding into life like a more acute Cribs before re-evolving two or three times over into jagged college rock in which the melody fights to emerge to the top as guitars dart, jab and eventually coast about and the action switches from accusatorial shouts to recent JoFo-like end of the night balladry of a broken man.

Shy And The Fight - All That We See Or Seem (revisited)

We've been waiting a while for the proper debut release from Chester's emotively centrifugal indie-folk collective - indeed we first blogged this song last May in its chrysalis form. The properly recorded version, a limited edition 7" out at the start of April on Popty-Ping Records, brings great fidelity to the old trick of starting delicate and ending up group rousing, committed to the last. Hear it here.

Jack Hayter - The Shackleton

Hayter's ability to connect the worn lines between ragged folk strum, spirit-soaked lived-in vocals, poignant yet oblique lyrical concern smuggling plain truths in descriptive surroundings and the odd lo-fi electronic foundation makes his occasional recorded output worth the wait, as with this pained timeline. There'll be plenty of it this year as Audio Antihero present The Sisters Of St Anthony, this being the first of twelve new songs for subscribers only.

Love Ends Disaster! - Starting Fires

Nottingham's most hotwired return with a new single that plays to and up against their strengths: guitars that alternately vibrate and howl, post-punk warped backwards anthemry (think BSP) and an ever present sense of existential dread. Obviously, being a song released in 2012 called Starting Fires, there's riot footage in the video.

Veronica Falls - My Heart Beats

This very Chart Show Indie Chart video is for new material from Veronica Falls, a hugely inconsistent band before now toning down the fuzz and with the aid of the increasingly worth watching out for Rory Attwell coming into their own as breezily efficient janglepop classicists. The Primitives are bringing out a new album soon but their standard as effervescent brain candy-drill figureheads may yet be outdone by the youth.

The Sunbathers - Summer Made Me Love You

Blissfully summery vibes for this drizzly March day from the Northamptonshire duo. Acoustic guitar, shaker, blissful beach-based hopefulness, all done in 100 seconds. From the January, February, March, Ely, Cambridge EP out as of this week.




The Sunbathers, as well as in ascending order of play August Actually, The Sweet Nothings, Anguish Sandwich, Just Handshakes (We're British), MJ Hibbett & the Validators, The Rosie Taylor Project and Tender Trap, are playing Leicester Indiepop Alldayer, curated and controlled by our fair hands, Saturday 24th March, Firebug, from 3pm, with the BMX Bandits film Serious Drugs after the music preceded by a Duglas T Stewart and producer Jim Burns Q&A. You can pay on the door if you wish but a good few advance tickets are still on sale.

Dolfinz - Teenage Bloom

From the free new Song, By Toad 2012 sampler (which also features among plentiful delights a new Meursault demo, the third album currently set for mid-July), a band following Copy Haho out of Stonehaven and a track that will come June be making up 25% of a sound of lo-fi Scotland/Manchester 12" on the label with PAWS, Waiters and Sex Hands. This is what Yuck aimed for and fell short of, pure early 90s harmonic pop shot out of a cannon and landing in a net constructed entirely from Kevin Shields' pedal board.

Breton - Interference

If Breton have a 'sound' it's one of declamation over bassy electronics and samples being pushed into the red. This time an actual freshly recorded orchestra, both played straight and loop sampled. provide a widescreen hook under a seperate big vocal hook, developing into a driving drone of dramatic intent and dark, self-destructive emotions filling in the gaps. Album Other People's Problems is out on the 26th.

Dexys - Nowhere Is Home

Finally, the long mooted (we're talking since 2004 here) Dexys fourth album is imminent. It's called One Day I'm Going To Soar, out June 4th. Officially just Kevin Rowland, first incarnation bassist Pete Williams and Mick Talbot (who was in the Projected Passion Revue version before his Style Councilling) these days, this is, slightly unexpectedly, a country take on the heartfelt Muscle Shoals soul version and, less unexpectedly for those acquainted with the last couple of new Dexys songs, features Rowland pondering his Irish roots and what they actually mean to him at length.

Tall Ships - T=0

When they're good, they're almost unbearably exciting. This, for example, may not have the most immediate melody at first - that comes, don't worry - but the looped math riff seems to grow more powerful with the repetition while around it is controlled thunderousness. When it turns into an actual song halfway through it's deceptively simple a la Tubelord, then we thunder back into the heart of the blaze. It's the first taste of their debut album proper, out through Big Scary Monsters/Blood And Biscuits on April 16th on white 7".



Perhaps the only band to have toured with both Three Trapped Tigers and We Are Scientists in the same year, they're about to go off and support two more slightly kindred spirits, Los Campesinos! this month and Maps And Atlases next:

20/3 Exeter Phoenix
21/3 Bristol Thekla
22/3 London Electric Ballroom
23/3 Oxford Academy 2
24/3 Birmingham Rainbow
26/3 Manchester Academy 3
27/3 Liverpool Academy 2
28/3 Edinburgh Liquid Room
29/3 Newcastle Academy 2
30/3 Norwich Waterfront
31/3 Sheffield Leadmill

16/4 Bristol Cooler
17/4 London Garage
18/4 Manchester Night and Day
19/4 Glasgow Nice 'N Sleazy
20/4 Leeds Brudenell