Friday 18th July - Robot vs Dinosaur are running a free night at the Island Bar with more excellent electronica and interestingly named genres.

Tuesday 22nd July - Ooh, this is one of ours. The Autumn Store hosts a pre-Indietracks gig at The Sunflower Lounge for several overseas bands who are playing the festival.

Thursday 24th July - A 444 Club/Bohemian Jukebox joint event, with Toby Goodshank. If you’re an obsessive reader of liner notes then you may know he played guitar on The Moldy Peaches album. I’ll be DJing some shambolic indiepop at this one too.

Monday 28th July - Ballboy return to Birmingham at The Flapper thanks to Gran and Pop.

Ah-ha!

The Smittens - Stop the Bombs
The Smittens - Party Time
The Smittens - Good Migrations

The Zebras - Science Competition
The Zebras - You Look Ready

Red Pony Clock - There’s Nothing Wrong With Getting High
Red Pony Clock - 12-Color Step

It is a bit of a shame as this gig is the closest that the Autumn Store has come to pushing the boundaries of indiepop towards what you might consider Capsule territory - but these things happen. I was mainly glad to finally be able to get Japanese band Andersens to Birmingham, with their co-headliners The Starlets and give The Sunflower Lounge a little night of diverse and lovable music of it’s own.

Local duo Bavarian Country Singers & Comrades kicked off the live music of the night in a perfect fashion. They play their own brand of lo-fi-country-pop using guitars and the occasional banjo and toy accordion.

They also did a great and unexpected cover of Jay-Z’s 99 Problems, which reminded me of the good old days when Autumn Stores Discos used to finish with the Ben Folds cover of Bitches Ain’t Shit.

One of the great things about BCS&C is that they both have really lovely singing voices that made the harmonies utterly spellbinding, and you just can’t help smiling at it all. There will always be a home at The Autumn Store for slightly shy and thoughtful acoustic pop duos like this.

The Starlets on the other hand have a more expansive sound gained from both the clever use of guitar pedals to enhance the arrangements (rather than for the sake of it) and by adding a violin and trumpet to the indie band 4-4-2 of drums, bass and two guitars.

The last few days of gigs left them sharp and definitely on form when they played the Autumn Store and the diversity of the song writing really did come through in the set – switching between quiet and hushed songs with whispered vocals to louder songs with good use of dynamics.

There were four members of Andersens who had come over from Japan for the tour, and at the start of the set they were joined by a saxophonist and the trumpet player from The Starlets to give the songs the type of depth that they achieve on record.

You could never accuse Andersens of not having a bold and unique songwriting vision. The songs often take in the gentler and relaxing elements of pop bands such as Architecture In Helsinki but always surprise you by pushing them in interesting directions.

They also have a very good way of filling their musical landscapes with snippets of melody that remain firmly with you for the day. Christmas Eve in particular has been following me round since the gig, just popping in to my head every so often to remind me that complex and quirky arrangements can be mixed with a sense of tunefulness.

At times Andersens pass through transitional jazzy moments, as a way of changing their songs but they always retaining that playful touch that prevents the songs from ever becoming as tedious as the word ‘jazz’ would usually suggest in a review. Towards the end of the gig, the brass section left the stage and the Andersens were left as a four piece, their last song featuring some clever guitar work over a flute led rhythm section.

It was also pretty exciting to find out afterwards that Andersens were responsible for Jens Lekman’s third favourite gig ever.

The night ended with some DJing and dancing. Remembering my love of acoustic covers of non-acoustic songs from earlier the Jeffrey Lewis version of Punk is Dead had to finish things off!

There are three acts on it at the moment, two are local -
· Friends of the Stars
· James Summerfield
· Sleepy Eyes Nelson

This one will appeal to you if you like music from the folk and/or blues end of the spectrum. I think I’m going to keep an eye on it because I like Friends of the Stars, especially when they do handy posts of home recording tips.

If you’re looking for something to put on the stereo to re-live all your festival memories (minus the smell of steam trains and several hundred popkids) then this may be it!

The Autumn Store’s pinup for this event is a Cuttlefish.

I read a particularly good article about them in New Scientist about how they communicate with other cuttlefish via their camoflage which is pretty darn clever really.

I’ve also tracked down a few free MP3s by the bands for you to download.

Andersens - Tear
Andersens - Christmas Eve

The Starlets - New Wave
The Starlets - Rocking In A Shy Way
The Starlets - All To Make You Feel Brand New

You can listen to some Bavarian Country Singers and Comrades tracks on their myspace.

You can find the downloads on the Billie The Vision and The Dancers website. They’re accepting donations too depending on how much you want to pay for them.

Billie The Vision and The Dancers are a fun band live, swaying away onstage, and it’s worth having a quick nose through some of their tracks. Or just download the ones I’ve linked below…

Billie the Vision and the Dancers - Nightmares
Billie the Vision and the Dancers - Summercat
Billie the Vision and the Dancers - You’re Not Giving Up On Me

The downloads/dontations way of releasing things is something that musicians keep mentioning to me as the way they want to release stuff. At the moment the best way of bands doing this seems to be to put up details for how to do an International band transfer or link to a paypal. If someone could find a way of incorporating the same system that Radiohead used for In Rainbows into a social networking site, or made it easy for bands to set up a page of their own to take donations for songs, I’m sure it’d be well used.

I’m sure you’ve guessed that I have a soft spot for The School, their cross between 60’s pop and indiepop and all things summer should warm all but the coldest heart (a cliche, but this time true). Like all good pop, the melodies are driven by some beautiful chord changes - think of your favourite early Beatles moments.

They’ve teamed up with Ian Catt too - who produced everything for The Field Mice, or if you’re not a massive massive Field Mice fan like myself, probably more famously Saint Etienne with whom The School share some common musical ground (this a good music review way of telling you that you may like The School if you like Saint Etienne).

Lead song Let It Slip hits you with a great pop hook at the end of the first verse (within the first minute, there’s no musical-water-treading by putting in extended introductions or verses that don’t need to be there on this EP) and swings by in just over the perfect 3 minute mark and .

Here it is -

Like all good EP’s, all the other tracks are as strong as the lead, Shoulder has one of those lovely Shangri-Las-esque talking bits and the chorus for I Don’t Believe In Love is so effortlessly catchy.

There’s also a bonus at the end for followers of local pop music, as Rob from The Voluntary Butler Scheme (who also used to drum with The School) sings a verse at the start of I Don’t Believe In Love to create a boy-girl dynamic to the dialogue.

I think there’s an album out towards the end of the year on Elefant, although sadly it may be after the summer months so it won’t get to soundtrack sunny weekends in the same way that We Are The Pipettes did in 2006. Not this year anyway.

I’ve also just spotted that The School have a blog.

On Friday 27th June, there’s two good gigs to pick between.

Hotpants Romance come down from Manchester to play at Patrick Kavanagh in Moseley.

Hotpants Romance - Sugar Dip (I know, I kept waiting for the picture to get bigger too - it’s ace though)

Also, on the 27th June The Retro Spankees and KateGoes play at The 444 Club at The Rainbow in Digbeth.

The Retro Spankees - My Sonic Driver

There’s a post-Indietracks gig too, as Scottish Indiepop band Ballboy are on tour and play at The Flapper on Monday 28th July! Lime Chalks and The Last Hurrah support and it’s brought to us by Gran and Pop.

Ballboy - I’ve Got Pictures Of You In Your Underwear

And…

Don’t forget that Robot vs Dinosaur is back tomorrow at Island Bar too!