Horace Greene – The Electric Slab
Yessir, I can boogie. And if you’re able to make others do it while sitting behind a musical instrument, you must be pretty skilled. In fact, I reckon you spent a good few years learning the intricacies of the said instrument. You see, boogieing, regardless of what you might have heard, doesn’t just happen immediately, or by accident. It requires a great deal of prep work.
But if you’re going to do that and also try to be in a rock band, you’d better have a sense of humour. And, more importantly, you best make people convinced that all that dancing around is part of a complex plot to reveal the dark intricacies of how the world really operates. Horace Greene is making light of it, even though the boogie is making them do crazy things.
On “The Electric Slab,” the group sounds like a very convincing dance-rock group that’s had to consume a million hours of prog-rock to be allowed to get to this point. But this ain’t just any old excuse to dance the night away. No, the lyrics talk about some kind of futuristic techno Armageddon, the kind that is in high fashion in indie music nowadays, the kind that Alex Turner refuses to tell us about as he hides in his Sheffield lair. Horace Greene might know more than they let on.
The Upsides – Very Bad Kids
Sure, it’s all fine and good to sing songs about Galileo and Figaro while introducing esoteric lyrics and changing the tempo of the tune every minute or so. But tunes like “Bohemian Rhapsody” work within popular culture because they are designed to be exceptions, to be the kind of French wine that you don’t have every day.
Most of the other songs on which pop music is built need to be like inexpensive black coffee, the kind that everyone needs, wants and likes. It needs to be the kind of thing that people can use as an excuse to start a conversation that ends with them saying: “Yes, that’s exactly the way that I feel myself.” It needs to be built on songs like “Very Bad Kids.”
Remarkably, this single shows that The Upsides are a brand new band with a very clear vision for what they want to achieve with their music. This is likeable, no-frills indie pop about fighting your way through the bad times in order to get to what life really has planned for you. The Upsides are an indie pop band who operate efficiently and deliver what the crowds need.
