Track: The Goa Express – Be My Friend
‘Be My Friend’, the new single from The Goa Express, emerges from the starting gates with such an abandoned joie de vivre that it’s exhilarating and heady. It’s a shouty, slightly snotty and utterly endearing post-punk blast of energy. It takes me back to the urgency and vitality of bands like The Buzzcocks and The …
Track: Future Islands – For Sure
Future Islands first gained world attention for their stunningly intense and committed performance of the single ‘Seasons (Waiting on You)’ on the Letterman Show way back in 2014. This somewhat overshadowed the fact that the band wrote and continues to write fantastic synth pop anthems. After a gap of three years, they are back with …
Track: Vast Asteroid – Champagne Ambassadors
There has been an increasing number of references to the genre of spacegaze – a highly volatile concoction of shoegaze, psychedelia and dream pop. Vast Asteroid so describe themselves, and it is most appropriate. Their new single, ‘Champaign Ambassadors’, is a shimmering, glittering wall of noise – all reverb and chorus layered over guitars and …
See: The Institutes release video for ‘Heal In Time’
If it wasn’t enough that The Institutes released one of the singles of the year so far – a jingle jangly hyper-delight of of a tune – they have added a suitably effervescent video for it. ‘Heal In Time’ (reviewed by me earlier this month) gets me feeling all nostalgic for a certain guitar-based buzz …
Album Review: DMA’s – The Glow plus tour news
DMA’s have forged their own unique and exhilarating path ever since they first came to the world’s attention with their single ‘Delete’. I remember when they appeared, apparently out of nowhere in Sydney, and were dismissed by some reports as a sort of Oasis tribute band. Anyone who actually listens to their music soon realises …
Track: Doves – Prisoners plus album news
Last month Backseat Mafia welcomed back the ever brilliant Doves upon the release of their first material in eleven years – the single ‘Carousels’. And to add fuel to the fire, Doves are back with another fantastic new single, ‘Prisoners’, as well as exciting news of a new album, entitled ‘The Universal Want’, due out …
Premiere: We Are Waves – SELVA
Backseat Mafia is honoured to premiere the new video from Italian post-punk/synthwave band We Are Waves for their blistering new track ‘SELVA’. Brewed and percolated in lockdown conditions, the wave of innovative and very exciting music from Italy continues unabated in this track: a hybrid of electronic industrial drive and straight out indie rock. The …
EP Review: Moscow Apartment – Better Daughter
The delicate fragility of the music and the achingly beautiful melodies that permeate ‘Better Daughter’ by Toronto duo Moscow Apartment plays a fundamental part in why this EP is so good. It is not, however, all that there is. Lyrically and in attitude, the band, despite its youth, is far deeper and more complex than …
Track: Phantom Isle – MAR V
The new single from London-based band Phantom Isle, is pure explosive medication guaranteed to sort out those isolation blues. ‘MAR V’ opens up with an eighties euro-disco stomp with the most mind-blowing bass riff and a wall of funky, filthy noise – guitars, synths and pounding insistent drums. It is absolutely exhilarating, mixing an early …
Track: The Agency… – Defender
Leaving three dots at the end of a sentence (…) implies something that will continue ad infinitum, something that is yet to be completed, there is more to come or allows you to complete the end. The collective known as The Agency… perhaps suggests any or all of those possibilities, and that can only be …