50 Tigercats - Isle Of Dogs
Tigercats aren't quite an indiepop band template, but then they're not quite not either. Duncan Barrett's mewling vocal places the lyrics squarely around their titular location and their hooks in the hammeringly infectious bracket. Their infectious love of making music recalls a less frenzied early Los Campesinos! with an odd nod to indie-Afrobeat, lyrically built on pop culture references and love stories located in specific places and emotional states, while their shuffling, determined interplay is more accomplished then they'd let on. They want to be a band the indie kids can believe in, and building on these foundations they might yet manage it.
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49 Moscow Youth Cult - Happiness Machines
The Nottingham duo aren't alone in giving a warped, colour over-saturated VHS effect or a sci-fi soundtrack effect to electronic textures but few envelope the listener in sonic effects so effectively. Some of it comes across as chillwave being beaten to within an inch of its life by marauding robots, elsewhere modern machines being imbued with the spirit of the northern electronic experimentalists of the early 80s, shaping circulating noise into slightly less harsh shapes and calling it a melody. Simultaneously retro and forward thinking, it's made for disco floors if only they were caught in the middle of a Commodore 64 loading screen.
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48 Threatmantics - Kid McCoy
A revised line-up since their 2008 debut and a departure from Domino have brought about a change of scope in the Cardiff band, a guitar now vying for lead role with a vaguely threatening viola but now with both greater focus and a more jagged, punchier approach to folk-punk art-angularity. Surf rock riffs clash with soaring epiphanies and existential musings, balls-out rock'n'roll deliberately steers down a wrong turning, the result feeling more direct and more willing to take the melodic road less travelled. They resolutely refuse to be stylistically pinned down, neither revivalists nor too outre but willing to tightrope walk the choppy seas between.
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47 The Rosie Taylor Project - Twin Beds
Hiring Wild Beasts producer Richard Formby was just the step the Leeds sextet required to make the crucial step forward from merely indie-folk shufflers into expansive maxi-pop arrangements, opening up the spaces and turning kitchen sink reminiscence into swaying melancholia with a hopeful lining. The debt to Belle & Sebastian is still there but the tremble in Jonny Davis' voice, the sumptuousness of the interplay between acoustic guitars and lilting trumpet lifts, the romantic notions underpinning the lyrical daydream escape attempts... it all works itself into a concoction that floats not through weightlessness but through lying back and thinking itself into the air.
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46 Sean Rowe - The Salesman And The Shark
Rowe's rumbling, sonorous baritone first came to attention last year, adding resonance to some detailed after hours storytelling. A year on it's even later, even more soused in last drinks of the night and his soul sounds stripped right down to sinew and bone while mostly filling out the sound around him with largely countrified string arrangements and pedal steel. His actual sound can't be truly contained, drifting from spare lament to Tindersticks baroque, though inevitably a Waits/Cohen dialogue pervades. Overall, like The Low Anthem, it's a sound that can't be totally pinned down but imbues a classic set of influences with rarefied grace and an open heart.
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