
Sleepy Kicks – Diamonds
Genre: Shoegaze, Indie Rock, Garage Rock
Sleepy Kicks find some personal drama to dig up for their music. Call it oversharing, but loud guitar music goes well with these kinds of lyrics.
Most people live in a world of small personal problems. Most of them have nobody to share them with. They either accept that they’ll slowly go insane, they join something stupid club, or they accept to pay an uninterested shrink. Nobody can comfortably keep all of their problems inside. It’s not the way things work.
But what about the ones that get to share their woes? Well, they might get to feeling better eventually. But there’s no guarantee anybody will actually want to hear them. For the most part, these sorts of confessions are begrudgingly heard by friends and family.
Rockstars have it easy. Sleepy Kicks get to tell us about their relationship woes on “Diamonds”, and everybody claps. With that kind of wall of guitars and festival-friendly vocal melodies, it’s no wonder. The band proves that finding the right audience is always key in both business and matters of the heart. Getting a wall of guitars can’t hurt, either.
The Pretty Flowers – Wildflowers
Similar artists: Teenage Fanclub, The Replacements, Guided By Voices, Superchunk, The Teardrop Explodes
Genre: Indie Rock
The Pretty Flowers present themselves as the kind of people who wake up singing and go to bed singing the songs that they end up recording.
Most people can’t justify wanting to be romantics. The world is far too ugly for that, and time moves too fast. People around them know that doing something like this is useless. The poetry, the singing, and the over-the-top statements about love and death have a certain pull to them but don’t seem to do any much good in a practical sense.
That’s why, especially in certain parts of the world, acting as if love can last forever or as if death is an inevitable topic worth considering each is almost tantamount to a rebellion. It’s not just rough towns and crime-ridden streets. This is especially applicable to boring old cities where people spend their money to buy new vacuum cleaners, not poetry collections.
The Pretty Flowers are true romantics for whom singing songs about the world as it should be is a means of survival. That much is clear from “Wildflowers.” But they’re neither dandies nor artists obsessed with tragedy. They get by on charm, on lovely melodies balanced by jingle-jangle power-pop backing. You gotta have faith in something!