The Underground of Happiness

Another hodge podge of generally loud fast music often featuring loud guitars and sometimes even loud keyboards. There are also some hushed varieties (to make up for the lack of volume those have a spooky air) and at least a few with no guitars at all. That's the beauty of pop music and 2014 was another vintage year. 1. Ezra Furman – My zero (Bar None) Let’s start with an album not technically released last year (towards the end of 2013), but it sank home with me in the early weeks of last January. The day of the dog is a bracing blast of beat rock n roll from an age before The Beatles, never mind the internet...committed, passionate and filled with buzzing guitar hooks and, inspiringly, saxophones. This song was my anthem from it. It’s a class tune all over. Shades of The Modern Lovers and even Violent Femmes here and there but Furman's voice in particular is all his own - brilliantly strained, reaching. There's not enough of that in pop music. The who...

It’s not often you get to compare two versions of the same song, by the same band, at the same time. And it’s even rarer to find that each version is as intriguing as the other. But that's what Trans Am have done. We first played the "alternate version" of the song on the show a couple of weeks ago. It’s a straightforward homage to The Jesus & Mary Chain, an exultant fuzzball of energy with a thrilling krautrock aftertaste. The album version shapes the simple three chord trick into a doomy, post punk/new wave creature with vocoder vocals, as if Phil Spector was reimagined in a tin can. There's a poignant air to it that's really impressive. Whichever way you cut it, it’s stirring stuff and will be featuring in plenty more playlists before the summer is out. Trans Am - I'll Never from Thrill Jockey Records on Vimeo .

Having watched the Big Star documentary Nothing can hurt me (if ever there was a misnomer) recently, I felt the need for a bit of Alex Chilton at his bleakest and best. Holocaust is like the downbeat flipside to The VU's I'll be your mirror, a truly heartbreaking piece of music. Angel Olsen is another singer with a voice to stop you in your tracks, she plays Cork next week. More from another American singer Joan Shelley who plays Cork tonight (May 28). New single from Tune-Yards , more brilliant songcraft from Merrill Garbus, this time bringing some dub and dayglo pop to the mix. Peter Broderick teams up with his friend Greg Haines and there's also dub involved, of a kind of outer space reverbed variety. Kramies , desolate but beautiful psych folk; The Vincent(s) strident and swampy; Laura Cantrell loves the fact that all the girls are complicated, but is still wary of the fact. And Trans Am , with the album version of a simple, stunning three chord trick,...

Sao Paolo to Tokyo, Cork to Perth. There's a new OOIOO album out soon, it's influenced by the sound of Javanese Gamelan music. I decided to build a mini-set around a track from it, with a classic Tropicalia cut from Os Mutantes , the current single from The Altered Hours and a new remix from perth (the band from Perth). The theme of this mini-set? I dunno...pop music infiltrated by psych pop and global folk musics? A new single from Rachael Dadd which is great and Joan Shelley , who tours Ireland this month - what a wonderful pure voice she has. New music from Orcas , a lovely ethereal sound a little bit reminiscient of Talk Talk ; we also had the latter, from the superb Spirit of Eden album. Then, more searching folk music from Arch Garrison , The Monks Kitchen doing Ray Charles, Trans Am doing JAMC. And Joe Meek shooting into outer space. May 13 2014 w/ Os Mutantes,OOIOO,Orcas, Talk Talk, Joe Meek,Arch Garrison,Trans Am,Tune-Yards++ by Theundergroundofhappines...