Song, by Toad

Well the season of lists and summaries and the relentless posting of annoying novelty Christmas songs may be upon us, and the release of new records may have slowed to the slightest of trickles to avoid being swamped by the overflow of effluvial Christmas Best Ofs*, but musicians are still plying their trade, even in December.

I found out about the Flashguns on that toppest of top cutting edge British indie blogs Fucking Dance. They are from Brighton and only barely out of diapers: still, in fact, at boarding school. So apart from being yet another indication that music is increasingly becoming an activity for the posh, who can afford the idle time and the kit (sometimes, just sometimes, I have some sympathy for the Gallaghers), the key question is of course: are they any good?

The short answer is an only slightly qualified yes. If you pop over to their MySpace page you can preview five songs, a couple of which I’ve cheekily ripped for you at the bottom of this post (of the others, House of Flowers is also well worth a listen). In sonic terms they flirt dangerously with Joe Lean/Johnny Foreigner/Courteeners jelly-mould NME toss-fodder. In my opinion however, their Smiths, Cure and other 80s British indie influences do more than enough to lift them well above that level of banal mediocrity. The slightly pained yelp of Sam’s vocal is a genuine pleasure and their guitar riffs have an insistence that has me irritating the shit out of my colleagues here at Proper Job with incessant two-finger table drums.

Ultimately I think you’d be forgiven for writing these lads off as just another of ‘that lot’, and they certainly won’t surprise you particularly, but I definitely think they have a little something extra that marks them out as being well worth keeping a bit more of an eye on. They’re pretty straightforward, but I rate these guys, I really do.

The Flashguns – St. George
The Flashguns – Bells at Midnight

*Best of the Libertines. The fucking Libertines. What a flagrantly whorish hawking of a once-great band that is. In fact, it may be the most offensive Christmas Best Of of the lot for me, just because of the sheer disregard for the integrity of their legacy that it represents. One can only assume the marketing exec whose idea it was was being sucked off by his own grandmother as he pitched it to his amphibious colleagues.