Griff says; 'Rawr! It's Lady Lioness.'

With the release on bandcamp this month of her third album,'The Glimmer and the Gleam', the time is ripe to introduce you all to the delicate, lo-fi, intimacy of 'Lady Lioness'.Modestly self-described as sounding; "Like cats fighting, babies crying, children whining and tragedy making itself known in a playful manner", 'Lady Lioness' is the solo project of singer/songwriter Erin Cavellier (pictured) who hails from Burlington, Vermont in the US. We here at Streetlamp HQ would, perhaps more accurately,describe her gentle and reflective song-writing style as wistful, acoustic, folk-pop.

In this latest album, as in her previous two releases; 'Where the Current Goes' and 'A Cub and a Den', Erin's distinctive and slightly haunted-sounding vocal accompanies her own light and minimalist playing to create music of genuine poignancy. To see what I mean, I recommend you have a listen (below) to her cover of Goffin and King's classic 'Will You Love Me Tomorrow?'(from 'Where the Current Goes'). I must admit here that, sentimental fool that I am, I personally find almost any recording of this song heart-rending but Erin's stripped-down and fragile ukulele and vocal version is just agonisingly touching in its simplicity. We also include below for your listening pleasure the breathy and sorrowful 'A Cricket Song' from 'The Glimmer and the Gleam'. Finally, as a special treat, we also have available the sweet and playful video for 'Tag, You're It!' (from 'A Cub and a Den') to show you the poppier side of Lady Lioness and to demonstrate that despite all of the serious stuff above Erin's a blithe and sunny wee thing really.

Thanks to icavellier for the video.

Like all of my recommendations on 'Streetlamp', 'Lady Lioness' makes all of her songs available as freely downloadable MP3s. She has also recorded songs in the past as 'Paws without Claws' and as part of the duo 'Boat Castle'. This music is also freely available.

If you want to make friends, Lady Lioness is on Facebook and Myspace.

~Kitten Wine~ #3 "The Cleaners From Venus"

Celebrating The Best Indiepop Records #3:
"Going To England" by The Cleaners From Venus



Escape....

That's what all the best Pop Music is about.....escape. Escape from the drudgery of real life and the grind-to-five. Brain Eno once said that Pop Music allows us to create other worlds, and that's exactly what Martin Newell and Giles Smith did on their wonderful 1987 album 'Going To England' under the guise of The Cleaners From Venus.
"For the next 38 minutes you will be England" boasts the back sleeve....and we are!! But not contemporary England, nor even the England of 1987, but the England of Antonioni's 'Blow Up', of 'The Knack....And How To Get It', of 'Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush', of Biba, of Mary Quant...
Come on!! Jump aboard and we'll take a trip to a better place....a place we can escape!!


Martin Newell

I can't recall how I stumbled upon The Cleaners From Venus but I am forever glad that I did. The CFV are the brainchild of Martin Newell who, on the back sleeve at least, looks like a cross between Withnail and Jerry Sadowitz. Thankfully he sings like neither! He also plays all the guitars and is helped out by Giles Smith who co-writes a couple of songs and plays all keyboards.
That's the introductions over....let's listen to the album....

The first three tracks of the album all feature girls names in the titles; 'Julie Profumo', 'Living With Victoria Grey' and 'Clara Bow'....all three are WONDERFUL. 'Julie Profumo' sets the tone of the album beautifully; chiming guitars, a driven rhythm and Martin's scene-setting lyrics "Cos this ain't the Sixties// and there's nothing to lose// and Julie Profumo is singing the blues". Oh, but it IS the Sixties surely!! Not the real, probably-quite-dull-really Sixties, but the Sixties from an Eighties rose-tinted nostalgic perspective. And then come's the beautiful refrain accentuating that this is all about escape, "And some day soon I will forget this junkyard// Take you with me if you're going that way// It's a changing world and let me tell you one thing// Time is wasting, shadows waiting...love will slip away". YEAH!!! I'm sold already.
I'm not sure if 'Victoria Grey' is a real person or not, but the dreampop backing that drapes around 'Living With Victoria Grey' brings her to vibrant life. It seems to be a song about a dalliance with a celebrity....not the 15-minutes-of-fame-nonsense celebrities we have today, but from a time when celebrities seemed to fall from Outer Space and were immediate royalty.
Clara Bow IS a real person of course, but back when I first bought this album I had no idea who she was...now she's one of my most cherished icons. The titular song reveals the desire to reach out to the unobtainable, "Clara Bow....I'd love to hear you talking//......but I can't". It may not actually be about Clara Bow of course, merely a metaphor for unrequited love....and it's all played out to gentle bossa-nova beat.
There are two other songs on Side One, but we'll come back to them shortly.



Side Two begins with the kind of faux-Sixties 'BIGPOP' that The Maisonettes and even The Style Council specialised in, complete with Blackpool Tower Ballroom keyboards; 'What's Going On In Your Heart' is like modern day Motown Miracles, whilst 'Girl On A Swing' contains one of the album's best lyrics, "I heard a whisper today// That the world would end on a weekday// Maybe we're free...to take a long weekend".
'A Mercury Girl' is a more gentler track, all tambourines and pianos before another highlight; a song that is SO 1960s it features a sample from a Beatles fan-club-only Christmas flexi, has Captain Sensible on lead guitar and is called 'Ilya Kuryakin Looked At Me'....as the song fades out John Lennon's dismembered voice bids us "Goodnight to ye's all and God bless ye's"....this would seem an appropriate place for the album to end, but there's one last track, 'You Must Be Out Of My Mind', a song that manages to be both trippy and poignant at the same time as it longs for a better world....like the past, or our melancholic image of the past.



So....a good album then? Well, yeah, it would be....if that were all there was to it....BUT, it becomes a BRILLIANT album because of the two songs I haven't mentioned yet...the two songs that round off Side One. If you've stuck with me this far then please keep reading as I'm about to go into PASSIONATE mode!!!

The final track on Side One would elevate this album to GENIUS status on it's own as I think it is ABSOLUTELY WONDROUS!!! The song is called 'Armistice Day' and is a deeply poignant track that recalls Private George from Blackadder Goes Forth and his sepia-hued tales of the Leapfrogging Tiddlywinkers From The Golden Summer of 1914. It's a song about the before and after of World War One, how a generation who basked in the wonders of the early 20th Century were sent off to mindless slaughter in a grotesque class war situation.
The song is very similar to The Revolving Paint Dream's 'In The Afternoon' which I've previously enthused over....the same beat, the same cyclical guitar pattern....you can actually sing 'In The Afternoon' over the top of it....but it's an equally astonishing song on it's own. Check these lyrics(my favourites on the album), "Sister mine// Some damson wine// Where the woods were white in Wintertime// Drink it down and remember how// You could not cry then, but can cry now// They have all gone away.....Armistice Day!!" Then comes the haunting "There is nothing that can make men happy like the sound of a cannon's roar// There is nothing that can make men happy like a war....LIKE A WAR!!" This song is just utterly magical, evoking a world where the ghosts of Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke and John McRae look back in anger, 'J'Accuse' style.

There are songs in my (admittedly vast) record collection that I love, there are songs that I cannot imagine life without, and then there are about 20 or so which transcend all platitudes and become part of my DNA....and the last song to be covered here is one of them. The song is called 'Follow The Plough' and maybe, to the casual or first-time listener, you hear nothing special about it...so let's go back in time and set it in some kind of context:
It was a Bank Holiday Monday in 1988 and I spent the entire day sitting in a girl's bedroom as we drunk ourselves IQ-less on cheap cider and Liebfraumilch(gird your stomach gentle reader!!). We played record after record after record; some oldie classics like Aretha, The Eagle's 'Desperado', 'Heart On My Sleeve' by Gallacher & Lyle(stop sniggering!!) plus modern day favourites like The Lilac Time, The House Of Love, Raymonde, The Shop Assistants etc. Every now and then I'd go back and put this track on....it's a song about deep infatuation, "When I came to meet you now// I followed you like a seagull follows the plough"....the lyrics cut deep as I was infatuated to the point of madness. I would have followed her EVERYWHERE!! The chiming guitar, the wordless backing vocals, the occasional strident chord....all combined to form the headiest of brews. And it doesn't let up, "You are before me// You are behind me// It was predestined that you would find me".
Listening to it now, I'm back in that bedroom, the chords swirling through the air like her intoxicating perfume, the vocals hanging like her cigarette smoke, the empty gnawing in my stomach...kiss me, for fuck's sake just KISS ME!!! The song becomes TOO personal, too painful....but that sweet pain, when unrequited love remains forever unrequited. Memories remain as hollow as the cold, greasy pizza boxes we used to soak up the alcohol....until this song is played and I can vividly recall the temperature in her room, the colour of her eyeshadow, the coarse, scratchy texture of her black cardigan....everything becomes alive again in the 3 minutes 43 seconds of this entrancing piece of music...........

You may think that this album is an odd choice to write about, but those last two songs mean this is an album I cannot live without. I don't play it often because it means too much....but when I do it becomes part of me...a part of my deepest memories, part of my beating heart.

Do you like music? Then you are of no use to me....music is not about 'like'....it is about LIFE, about LOVE, about PASSION...music is not about one thing....IT IS EVERYTHING!!
If you haven't understood anything I've just said, then you don't like music at all.

.....................Leave your soul at the door on the way out.

~Gordon~

The gentleman in the picture that accompanies these tracks is Giles Smith.

You can hear 'Julie Profumo' at the Cleaners From Venus Myspace site here

~Kitten Wine~ #2 "Emma's House" By The Field Mice

Celebrating The Best Indiepop Records #2: "Emma's House" E.P. by The Field Mice

"Where is that chaos that usually flows from me?"

How can a 7" 4-track EP contain all the clout, imagination, and life-affirming beauty of a triple LP concept album? Simple....when it's the "Emma's House" EP by The Field Mice, or Sarah Twelve to the anoraks!!
This is quite simply one of the GREATEST records ever made....I love it, I absolutely LOVE it!!! This is the record that soundtracked the golden Summer of 1989, the record that created a backdrop of warm twilights, giddy headrushes, broken hearts and melancholic longing.
Let's take it by the hand and walk to the top of the hill....the sun's just setting.......



Five to Six....somewhere it's always Five to Six, and Five to Six is the time I used to leave my house to walk the considerable distance to the only bus-stop in my village where I could get the bus to HER town......and on title track 'Emma's House'; "Five to six that's what the time is//Where you are...." I used to sing this refrain every time I walked that bus-stop. On the way I would pass a run down old house that we always used to believe was haunted; "Emma's house is empty//So why do I call it Emma's House?" The song sounds like pure Summer, strummy chiming guitars, the bass playing a melody of it's own(á la The Marine Girls), and a really primitive drum machine. It can't be any exaggeration that the Summers used to be better when we were young, but all the times I walked to that bus-stop, it only ever rained once!



Since my childhood, and through my teens, adolescence and twenties, I was a ludicrously light sleeper. A goldfish could break wind downstairs and I'd suddenly be wide awake. Whenever I stayed at HER house, I'd spend the entire night lying wide awake beside HER. This is where 'When You Sleep' comes in......
"When you sleep// I listen to you breathing//When you sleep//I listen as the air(pause)....leaves you". As we will discover later, it's the pauses that hammer the nails of heartbreak to the wall.
"I can't help feeling// This cannot last// I can't help feeling// You will break my heart(pause)...break my heart". The pessimists among you will know this experience only too well. If you've ever lay awake beside someone all night, you'll know how deep this song cuts, for it is at these moments that all doubts escalate, and this song captures that sense of hopelessness completely.



On Nick Cave's storming epic 'Do You Love Me', he growls mournfully one of the most downbeat lines imaginable; "I knew before I met her that I would lose her"....OUCH!!
And that could be said of 'The Last Letter'; easily one of the most heartbreaking songs EVER, I knew long before I ever met HER that there would come a time when I would have to turn to this song.
The melodic bass introduces us before a haunting(yet strangely upbeat) piano refrain drapes itself over the song. This is where songwriter Bob Wratten really comes into his own....this song is shot through with so much self-deprecation that the very timbre of his voice stabs you through the heart. The killer line that destroys me on every listen contains the single most heart rending pause; " I never was one// To try// I never was any good(pause)....was I?"
When SHE left, I knew it would become impossible for me to ever listen to this song again.....for a long time anyway. Even now, even though I love the song so much, I tremble before the power it has over me. It's a song I can only ever play if everything in my life is going well, a song of such incredible beauty that I can only wonder how empty my life would be had I never found it.



So what does that leave us with? The wistful coda of 'Fabulous Friend'; a vapour-trail, a faded Polaroid, a glance backwards, memory tail-lights fading....."She WAS my fabulous friend"(emphasis on the word 'was')....and YEAH, that's all SHE was....and this is only a 7" piece of vinyl with some songs on it, right?



It's a record like this that makes me despair of people whose lives aren't dominated by music, those for whom pop songs are mere aural wallpaper, who never feel the emotions of a strummed 12-string crackling and popping on the Dansette.

Emma's House may be empty......but now my heart is full.

~Gordon~

~Kitten Wine~#1: Whaam Records 'All For Art...And Art For All'

The First In A Series Of Blogs Celebrating The Indiepop That Has Shaped Our Lives:

#1: 'All For Art...And Art For All'; Whaam Records Compilation(June 1984):

Compliation albums! Never really given the same kudos as 'proper' studio albums or even 'Live' albums, and yet....there have been a few Compilation albums that have surpassed even the greatest of all studio albums; Lenny Kaye's 'Nuggets' of course, the magisterial 'Pillows & Prayers' and virtually anything on Sarah Records or Bam-Caruso.
But, as far as I am concerned, the most important Comp in my record buying lifetime simply has to be Dan Treacy's Whaam Records catch-all 'All For Art....And Art For All'. This record is one of the very few that ABSOLUTELY changed my life!!

'All For Art....' was released in the Summer of 1984, but I didn't find it till the December of that year. I was going through a 60s psychedelic phase at the time, and when I found this in the record racks I assumed with it's images of Andy Warhol, band names like The Laughing Apple, and song titles like 'Only The Sky Children Know' that this was a collection of obscure 60s tracks. On first play, when I realised it was a contemporary collection, I was a little disappointed, but very quickly the thrill of the music took me over.

This album is bookended by TWO of my Top 10 Favourite songs OF ALL TIME....two EPICS that still make my heart flutter and my head reel furiously....but we'll get to them later.

First, let's deal with The Mixers....their first track on the album, 'Never Find Time' thwacks along driven by a snapping snare that conjures up a tooth-coroding mix of The Jam and The Honeycombs...and is every bit as sweet. Later they serve up 'Love Hurts' laced through with acidic Lalala's....a song SO 1960s it's wearing Cuban Heels.
Next up, The Page Boys.....and a song called 'Honey'. Anachronistic contemporary drum machines and Casio-like keyboards are swept away by a recurring 'Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah' motif(starting to get the picture?). A song that manages to sound 60s and 80s in the same three minutes.

Tangerine Experience's 'Only The Sky Children Know' probably sounds exactly like you imagine. Like some huge Prog Rock anthem played by sussed hep-cats....it's a gigantic, multi-hued explosion of psychedelic wibblery.
It's left up to The Pastels to follow it up. Aaaaah....The Pastels!!! Here sounding SO young, pale and undernourished it's a wonder social services weren't called. 'I Wonder Why' is a song so fey you want to give it a mug of soup! But it's beauty is every bit as comforting.
Ex-Swell Map Jowe Head follows up with 'Lolita', a weird melange of whistling, fractured vocals and erratic guitar playing. It's the kind of song that could probably give David Tibet nightmares. He appears later with a track called 'February' which is even stranger. Like an underwater medieval folk song....it took me YEARS to appreciate his contributions to the album, I was probably just too young at the time.
The Direct Hits contribute two of the very best tracks on the album, 'Girl In The Picture' and 'What Killed Aleister Crowely'. 'GITP' is a beautifully crafted pop song of pure unrequited love as the vocalist sits in his room fantasising about the titular Girl. It could also be about stalking!! I love the swooshy phasing effect on this track. '...Aleister Crowely...' is another perfectly produced mini-masterpiece which ends with the threatening "I can see through Aleister Crowely's eyes..." I have to confess I didn't know who Crowely was at the time I bought the album, and finding out obviously changed the entire song for me.


Dan Treacy's hand is, obviously, all over this record, from producing it, designing the sleeve, running the label, and being the main man in The Television Personalities and it is they who bring Side One to an end with the wondrous 'The Dream Inspires'. I've often wondered if this is a song about Oxford, but it is SO good that who really cares?

On to Side Two:
Kicking off with The Mad Hatters, 'Dancing With The Dead' is almost pure 1967...in fact the intro is reminiscent of (the then psychedelic) Status Quo's 'Ice In The Sun'.
Acoustic strumming, a harp, and the most tremulous voice imaginable...yes, it's Jed Dmochowski and his beautifully fragile lament 'I'm Sad'.
Then comes The Laughing Apple and the brilliant, vibrant, amphetamine hit of 'Wouldn't You', featuring on vocals Alan McGee....yes, THAT Alan McGee. The Laughing Apple would later change it's name to Biff Bang Pow and re-record 'Wouldn't You' in a rather over-produced fashion. This is the better version.
The Gifted Children are next with the brilliant 'My Favourite Films', a song that manages to namecheck Malcolm MacDowell, Albert Finney, Tom Courtney, Oliver Reed, Carol White, Wendy Craig and Rita Tushingham. What? No Terence Stamp or Julie Christie?

Which leaves us with the BIG TWO!
The opening track on this album is 'In The Afternoon' by The Revolving Paint Dream; this is, as I've said, one of my favourite songs of all time. It begins quietly enough with what sounds like the oldest, tinniest drum machine, punctuated with occasional LOUD snare whacks. On top of this is a cyclical guitar pattern, and then the vocals kick in; "Dont Go..." they beg, DRENCHED in echo and reverb. The verse builds and builds until it collapses under it's own overwroughtness into the chorus "In the afternoon....we made love" The song is full of snatches of impassioned pleading, "Sometimes feelings go beyond words....and I don't feel real at all", "Maybe I could make it better?", "Now this lust was always love" "When she goes away....." Eventually the voices become so overlapping and echoey it begins to sound like a Gregorian Chant and becomes so loud in the mix, it distorts....or that could just be my copy! The Revolving Paint Dream would later release a proper album of their own with a re-recorded version of this track complete with female lead vocals....but THIS is the ABSOLUTE mutt's plums!!! It can still make me cry even just writing about it.


The album ends with another Television Personalities track 'Happy All The Time', and WHAT an incredible song!! "She paints an earthquake" Dan mutters at the start before we're off into another cyclical guitar pattern, heavy drums and weird keyboard effects. It's a song about unhappiness, maybe even depression; "Ha ha ha said the clown// As he fell down// And the audience laughed and cheered//But they never saw the tears" sings Dan before the mighty chorus; "And I'm just looking for rainbows//In a star filled sky//And I'm just waiting for the sun to shine//I remember somebody told me//That God is yours and mine//But nobody ever told me that pigs could fly".
After about three minutes the song ends, then comes a bunch of weird noises, the sound of a tape being rewound, and then three false re-starts before the song goes back into the chorus. If Jean Luc Godard ever produced a pop record, THIS is what it would sound like. The false starts and weird edits give the song a poignancy that has stuck with me for almost 25 years now.

This album would always make my list of Top 10 Albums Of All Time, even if it just had those two tracks on it.
The album has never been properly re-issued on CD, but a grab-bag of all of Whaam! Records output was released under the title of 'Whaam Bam Thank You Dan' which contains a good 75% of the tracks that appeared on this album.
You can download it here
I advise you SERIOUSLY to do so immediately!!

~Gordon~

PS: If some of these lyrics are wrong then I apologise, but that's what they've always sounded like to me!!!

UPDATE: The two songs by The Mixers on this album can be heard in full on their Myspace page: here

Griff Says; "Wild Honey. Me Gusta!"

Given the ideals and philosophy of this blog, now seems like a good time to tell you about the latest project from 'Wild Honey’.
This month they have released a new song; ‘Prevent the Road from Being Buried by the Sand’ (listen to it on their website) and have also been playing live as part of the presentation of La Doropaedia´s new issue.
La Doropaedia is a thematic fanzine that features articles, songs and pictures around a single topic. This new issue is about the concept of the Commons. For this issue, 'Wild Honey’ have provided ‘Prevent the Road from Being Buried by the Sand’ ,a song based on this idea, that was written, recorded and mixed in less than a week.
'Wild Honey’ is essentially the project of twee-pop/indie-folk music genius Guillermo Farré (pictured below) and his group of friends and is based in Madrid, Spain.

Guillermo says of ‘Prevent the Road from Being Buried by the Sand’:
“I had to study what Commons really was, a legal and philosophical concept hard to include in a song. What I liked about it was that it has roots in the idea of collective works and in the concept of shared goods and services, which I think is present in many Woody Guthrie songs (and in many other protest songs from that era, of course). I tried to give the song a twist putting it into a different context, writing about the end of the feudalism and the moment when people in villages started to manage their own lands.
In the end, I tried to mix a Woody Guthrie song with a Joe Meek style production, keeping the acoustic guitar but filling everything with noises and tremoloed guitars.”

Here at ‘The Streetlamp’ HQ the idea of a song that mixes Woody Guthrie with Joe Meek makes us quite weak at the knees. We hope you’ll be similarly smitten. For a taster of the ‘Wild Honey’ sound check out the video below (featuring Guillermo, Anita Steinberg and Cristina Gomez).The featured song ‘Isabella’ is track 8 from Wild Honey’s debut album; ‘Epic Handshakes And A Bear Hug’ (released 29 October 2009) which can be downloaded free from their ‘bandcamp’ site.

Thanks to lainformacion.com for the video.

If you enjoyed that and, like me, can’t get enough of sunny folk pop featuring; glockenspiel, ukulele, and whistling then have a listen to two more songs from the same album.

If you want to make friends, then Wild Honey are also on Facebook and Myspace.

Griff says; 'Check out CLLCT! Do it now!

So, where do we begin? With introductions I suppose. It seems rather formal but we'd like you to know who we are and what we're about and, who knows, perhaps in time you'll grow to love us. So far there are three of us involved in 'the streetlamp doesn't cast her shadow anymore'. There's Griff and Gordon who are lo-fi musicians involved in the indie-folk band 'sighrens' and there's Ray an amateur film-maker. We'll all be involved in producing content for this blog and we'll each of us occupy a special niche. Ray will obviously be responsible for the video content. Gordon will be sharing his love and encyclopaedic knowledge of Indie-pop. In particular he'll be featuring music in the Twee, Shambling, C-86 and Cuddlecore genres. Griff's special areas of interest are Lo-fi, Acoustic indie-folk, Bedroom-pop and Outsider music. Hopefully, there'll be something for anyone with an interest in genuine independent music.
Why are we doing this? Simple, we love music and we love the freedom of the internet as a forum for obscure, over-looked and unsigned bands to get their work into the public domain. At one time both myspace and last.fm were wonderful resources for small independent artists and labels to do just that. It now seems that the corporate types who run music as an industry don't like it when artists remain independent and allow the music to be freely available to all. Changes to these sites has had the effect of further marginalising and squeezing out these small independents. We intend to give them some room here.
Given the above, it seems fitting then that my first post is about the wonderful CLLCT website.

CLLCT is the abbreviated name for 'The Collective Family'. Basically, this is a group of artists loosely amalgamated around the CLLCT website all of whom are happily prepared to just give their music away. A noble idea, I'm sure you'll agree. CLLCT features some well-known lo-fi indie bands such as 'Madeline Ava' 'Tinyfolk' and 'Wisdom Tooth'.
However, a dig around in the lesser known reaches of the site will bring its own rewards. The true indie enthusiast with time on his/her hands and a zeal for the thrill of the new will soon unearth many under-rated and criminally unknown acts of genuine quality. It's the ultimate indie-snobs dream site. Give it a visit and soon you'll be dropping the names of your own private discoveries into pub/work/student halls conversations in the true spirit of indie one-upmanship.

A Secret Owl, who runs the site, sums up his philosophy rather nicely in this excerpt from the CLLCT myspace page:

"The Collective is me and some other friends and neat musicians, and we put up music for free.

Yeah, I know, you want to make money. It's not a crime, don't be ashamed (...okay, never mind, you're not). You have to do some thinking, though. If nobody knows who you are, is some random dude who stumbles upon your myspace (or, okay, maybe you added him, whatever) going to buy a CD or a shirt or something? Pshht, you already know, but HELL NO.

The hard fact is: you're probably not ever going to make much money. BUT WHO FUCKING CARES? Shit, if I wanted to make money, I'd become a fucking lawyer or a doctor or something. I make music because I love it, and you should be the same way.

So, submit your music to the collective, and lots of people will download it. And they'll listen. And you'll be on their playlists, on their iPods, and on their mixed CDs. They'll listen to you when they drive to work, when they go to school, when they drive to the grocery store. Younglings will hear your music, and when they grow older, you'll influence the music they make.
Can you feel that? "


I don't think we need add anything further other than to say; If you're an indie fan check it out and if you're in a band then what are you waiting for? Get submitting!


Griff
xx

The Minor's Strike

Hello Children,
Here is today's story.
Are you sitting comfortably? Then we'll begin....

Once upon a time there was a little Lo-fi Bedroom-pop band named ~Sighrens~.
They loved nothing more than creating their hearfelt, tender songs of lost love and faded memories and sharing them with their good friends and the like-minded souls out there in Internetland. They built up a little community of friends and musicians who made music that they allowed to be streamed online and downloaded for free. It was a happy time for all and big companies that allowed them free reign, Myspace, Last.fm etc, seemed content to let them do as they pleased. It was all smiles in the happy valley.

One day however, the Big Bad Wolfwhores decided that everyone was just a tad too happy and decided to remove all access to full track streaming. Thus, all the little popkids were deprived of hearing tracks in full before they decided to download or buy new music. This proved calamitous to all the little, non-profit making musicians who suddenly found themselves deprived of the oxygen of free publicity.
It would appear that some greedy so-and-so's(Hello Gene, Hi Lars) just can't stand the idea of free music for the people. They really feel the deprivation of that whole 79p per track.

And so there was a great wailing and nashing of teeth in the valley....

And lo, ~Sighrens~ feeling mighty aggrieved at the greedy capitalist whoring of millionaire rock musicians cast themselves from the garden and decided to try and forge a new community where their friends and the fellow musicians whose music they so treasured dearly could frolic freely away from the clutches of 'The Man'.

This Blog and it's accompanying links and side projects will hopefully be that new garden of beautiful music and harmonious cordiality.

We can but hope....

To download all of ~Sighrens~ music for free please visit our last.fm page by clicking 'here'.



~The Sad Panda~