The Underground of Happiness

Ex Stereolab all over this week's show. Tim Gane's new band Cavern of Anti-Matter have a great debut album full of machine drones and kosmische tones. Meanwhile Laetitia Sadier sings guest on the new Giorgio Tuma album, beautiful drifting dream pop under the shadow of Morricone. The Goon Sax are from Brisbane and make lovely off kilter guitar pop very much in the style of early Go Betweens (as it happens the band features Louis Forster , son of ex Go Between Robert). M Ward is back with a new album, another gorgeous excavation of his roots of rock n roll influences - doo wop, country, soul et al. And his old compadres in Giant Sand are touring soon, including Cyprus Avenue in Cork on April 14th (with Jason Lytle too of Grandaddy fame). And some baroque pop - The Zombies, Nick Garrie and The Association , a certain glorious psych edge is never far away. More on the blog. The Underground of Happiness uplifting pop music of every creed www.theundergroun...

Thrilling jangle pop with actual political engagement from what seems like another age (in fairness it was originally released almost 30 years ago) from the band that gave birth to Stereolab (kind of). Providing proof if it were needed that the famous C86 sound could accommodate teeth underneath its smiling face. The guitar of Tim Gane supplies the chiming hooks but the vocals of Malcolm Eden give great emotional heft, as on the very poignant ‘The well of loneliness’. They are many, we are few There’s not much we can do As it happens, it’s one of the least overtly political songs in this collection but one of the most touching.

And now for a double whammy of Laetitia-flavoured goodness...as the NME might say. Laetitia Sadier’s third solo album sees her take another short step away from the beat-driven glory of Stereolab, in the direction of something more meditative, you might say taking a cosmic view, although as much as ever there is a distinct social, or even sociological, undercurrent to the music. In fairness, it’s not as if drums (and particularly bass – the second half of ‘Butter side up’ has a driving ‘Lab-ish backbeat over the refrain “we need answers”) play no part on Something shines , but the overriding impression from these songs is of someone taking stock of the world, probing, questioning, rather than making any overt, bold statements. The epitome of this is the middle track, ‘Release from the centre of your heart’, which comes across very much as the centrepiece of the album. It has shades of Stereolab in the vocal layers, but these are outweighed by thoughts of the orchestral ...

A few years ago, I came to a conclusion. I decided that the world was divided into two types of people. Not doctors and nurses, as Brendan Behan (quoting the English painter Constable , I think it was) once famously told Eamonn Andrews in an early Irish tv interview. The two types of people I'm talking about are those who love Ennio Morricone and those who don't. I decided that anyone who didn't appreciate the music of this man was a philistine, could not be trusted and could not be my friend. This radical division of humanity was brought on by immersing myself in More Mondo Morricone , a compilation brought out by the German Colosseum label in 1996. The subtitle on the album gives you key information about the content - " more mindblowing film themes by Ennio Morricone from Italian cult movies ". (If ever a product description perfectly matched the contents, that is it.) This was the second in the Mondo Morricone series . There's a great review of the...