Well, this will be the last “new findings” for a couple of posts now as I want to concentrate and discover the Indietracks bands that were announced and that I don’t know. So, that on the next post. On this one, 5 new findings!
Stephen’s Shore: the most exciting news in a while is that of our friend’s debut album “September Love” on Meritorio Records from Spain. 10 jingle jangly songs, wonderful songs, that I can’t stop playing on their Bandcamp while I wait for my copy of the record to arrive home. Actually I should be having some extra copies if anyone in the US is interested in buying one, probably cheaper from me. I will add the record to the distribution section of the Cloudberry site when that happens. In the meantime I ask you, I demand you, to have a listen of this beauty. I know it is early to say, but this might be the record of the indiepop record of the year. What a lovely effort of chiming guitars. So happy and proud to have worked with them in the past!
The Catherines: I’ve recommended the Hamburg based band a couple of times if my memory serves me right. It has always been in the way of digital releases, songs on Bandcamp. Finally I see the band is putting something out in a physical format thanks to the Alicante, Spain, label Mondo Canapé. It is a tape with 8 songs and limited to just 50 copies. The solo-project by Heiko Schneider plays indiepop, straight up indiepop, jangly, tweeish sometimes. It is impossible not to like it. If you want just a teaser you can start with “Good Golly Goo“, which they have put together a promo video.
Battery Point: I’ve been a fan of the Chula Vista, California, band for a while now. Recommending every single song they put out on their Bandcamp. So far I don’t have any of their releases as they are mostly being released digitally. I need a CD, a 7″, something like that. I’m old school I suppose. This time around the band have unveiled their latest, a 3 song EP titled “A Memory For Today”. It has three songs, “Another Year”, “Time” and “You Should All Be Murdered”. The last one of course is a cover of Another Sunny Day’s classic song. Great stuff.
Nah…: the new project of Sebastian Voss from The Grindcore Poppies is this oddly named band. For this project he joins forces with Estella and with her, and the help of Kenji from The Fairways and many other bands, he has recorded 4 songs that are available on a CD titled “Summer’s Failing EP” which you can pre-order now. The songs on the CD are “Summer’s Failing”, “This Light Will Always Shine”, “Annie” and “Linus”. Right now we can only stream one of the songs, the first one, and I am loving it. It does take us back to the indiepop halcyon days, to Sarah Records and bedroom bands. Really lovely song, so I can’t wait to hear to the rest of them!
Tiny Fireflies: happy, very happy, to be listening their new gorgeous record on Bandcamp. But not as happy as I could be if I had the 7″ at home. Yup, I need to order it ASAP, so that’s what I’m doing now. The 7″ for “Nothing” and “2040” was released on March 13th and it is only limited to 250 copies. As you know Tiny Fireflies is formed by Kristine Capua and Lisle Mitnik from Chicago. This record had the help from more friends, I see Hampus recorded drums for Nothing and Cris mastered the songs. I’m always very happy to know that I have very talented friends!! Get it, because it is really something!
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The Honeymoons from Sweden. As of the last few months I managed to get their 4 albums in my collection and I must say I have really enjoyed them listening one after the other. It took me years to do this as I had their first release, the “She’s My Heroine” 7″ since at least 2008 or 2010 as it was on a trip to Berlin, to Uwe Firestation’s house that I bought this record.
It too me years to do this, but by no means I have their whole discography now. There are many other singles and EPs that I’m missing. Most of them were released by the legendary Swedish label North of No South. The only release that wasn’t was the 7″, which actually happens to be their only vinyl release. All their other output came out on CDs. It was the mid-nineties.
The 7″, “She’s My Heroine”, was released by the label Jakaranda Records (JAR 914) in 1991. This was a label from the city of Umeå. The record had two songs, “She’s My Heroine” on the A side and “Five Fifteen” on the B side. The artwork, created by Christofer Fredriksson, with the dolphins jumping, does remind one of Orange Juice. There’s not much more information on the sleeve. Here we see that Per Rosenberg is credited of writing the songs, and I would find that he was the vocalist and also played guitar in the band.
Two years will pass until we heard again from the band. Now signed to the exciting North of No South, the band would grace the 6th release on the CD catalog of the label (NONSCD06) with their self-titled “Honeymoons” mini-album. There were 6 songs included in this fine 1993 effort by the band: “She’s Gone Too Far”, “Colourblind”, “We Could Just”, “058”, “Pale Sun” and “Hey Hey”. We could hear the jangly guitars, the love for a good melody, not too far from the Cod Lovers who I interviewed recently. It was indeed the time of the first golden era for Swedish indiepop. Again the art is credited to Christofer Fredriksson and we see that the producer was Per Helin wh had been involved in Puffin and Ray Wonder, other good bands from the period. The engineer was Pelle Henricsson (who owned Tonteknik Recording studios in Umeå) with assistant engineer Eskil Lövström, also from Puffin. Something that does catches one attention is that several drummers are listed. David Nestander for tracks 1,2,5 and 6, Joakim Ahlstrand for track 3 and the aforementioned Pelle Henricsson on track 4.
Again a gap of two years. Finally the first full-album by the band. It was titled “Domestic” and was released on November of 1995 on North of No South (NONSCD23). Eleven songs that continue what they started in the mini-album: “My Honey You”, “Travel”, “A Day Like Today”, “Entertainer”, “Some Days”, “Know You Do”, “Another Dream For Sale”, “Over and Over”, “Me and the Ghosts”, “Flowergirl” and “All Those Feathers”. Art again by Christofer Fredriksson. Once again the songs were recorded at Tonteknik by Eskil Lövström and Pelle Henricsson with Per Helin as the producer (Per also played percussion on tracks 5, 9, 10, by the way). Other credits on the record include Eskil Lövström helping with trombone, Pelle Henricsson with tambourine and our friend from The Seashells, Erik Domellöf on guitar on tracks 2 and 3. We also know that Lars Oskarsson played backing vocals and bass guitar; Magnus Öberg, drums and guitar; Jörgen Gustavsson the organ.
Just before this album, that same year, was released North of No South had released the CD single “Travel” (NONSCD22). Just two songs were included here, “Travel” and “My Innocent Friend (Demo Version)”. Here we see exactly the same credits as for the album.
The band also released that year another CD, the mini-album “Louder” (NONSCD12). 6 songs and the same credits but the art, now they had Magnus Åström taking care of the graphic design, the look, of their record. The songs on this CD were “Difference”, “Monday Bin”, “How to Change the World”, “I Can Do”, “Here Comes the Fall” and “Fifteen Seconds”. Even with the change of artist, the coherent use of fonts, color and negative space continued. I wonder if, as they were always using the same people to record, and the look of the artwork was always in the same line, how disciplined where they to stick to what worked for them. It seems they had found a comfort zone and they loved it and knew how to work within.
1996 was going to be a bit busy, with two CDs being released. The first, “A Day Like Today”, was a CD single (NONSCD28) that included “A Day Like Today” and “A Day Like Today (remix)”. I suppose they continued promoting the “Domestic” album with it. And then I suppose the band wanted to get away of that comfort zone and released a 4 song CD EP of remixes by Histrionic titled, “The Histrionic Remixes”. As I’ve said many times, I’m not much of a fan of remixes in general but well, it was the 90s I suppose. The songs that got the remix treatment were “Travel”, “We Could Just”, “Flowergirl” and “Difference”.
1997 was to see the light their final album, “The Coherent Excitation”. For this record the band had a new drummer, Markus Backstrom and had gotten percussion help from Mikael Emsing on tracks (1, 3, 5, 7, 6, 9, 10). The album actually had 11 songs, “Never Forget” (that had backing vocals by Ludvig Boss from Ray Wonder), “Flourescein”, “Evil”, “Fabrications”, “Dreamtime”, “Would You Believe”, “Let them Strive”, “Breathe On”, “Colder”, “Turn Aside” and “As We Are”.
As it was the rule, North of No South released a CD single to promote this album. The “Fabrications” CD single (NONSCD53) included the title song and also “My Innocent Friend”.
There are 7 compilation appearances listed on Discogs. Let’s go chronologically through them. The first one is actually on the first ever North of No South CD, on the “North of No South – Compilation CD” where the band appears with the songs “You Never Say” and “Tell Me Why”. Thanks to the credits of this record I notice that North of No South started as a sub-label of Jakaranda. Interesting. Also here the Honeymoons are listed with a different drummer, Jocke Ahlstrand. And to complete the band we see of course Jörgen Gustafsson, Lars Oscarsson and Peter Rosenberg. It does seem that during the years the drumming position was the problem. Now something interesting is that even though the band was Umeå based, they went further north, to Luleå, to record these two songs with Stefan Larsson at Gateway studios.
I’ve mentioned about the great Gothenburg based Pet Sound fanzine, that introduced so many great Swedish bands to the indiepop crowd. On the 5th and last tape they put together, “Pet Sounds Vol. 5”, and in a very limited pressing of around 100 copies, the Honeymoons appear with the song “Flowergirl (Demo)” alongside fantastic bands like The Cardigans, Eggstone or Easy.
“Flower Girl” ended up being a popular song and it was included on Rainbow Music sampler “Life’s A Joke” in 1993. This CD was compiled by Nicke Boström who is better know as the guy behind the superb record store Delicious Goldfish.
“Big Smile From Big Snowflakes City” was a CD compilation released in Japan in 1995 as a sort of a sampler, an introduction, of the bands to this new public. Here the Honeymoons appear with the great “She’s Gone Too Far”.
“My Honey You” and “We Could Just” were to appear on 1996’s “A Veritable Smorgasbord of Music” CD compilation that was put out by North of No South (NONSCD50), and that same year their songs “Travel” and “15 Seconds” appeared on “NONS Vol.2” that was released on the same label (NONSCD25).
Lastly, in 1998, probably when the band was already no more, they had the songs “Fabrications” and “Evil” on the “Aaaaaah… NONSCD75” CD compilation.
I look online and my first hit is that of a blog called “Tidskriften Pop Revisited” were there are several posts about the band. There is a mention here where it says that the band had put together a tape, of not the best quality it seems, that had no cover, no information, nothing. The writer complains about it. It seems it was a demo the writer received. But there is no year, so can’t say when did this happen. On another post the writer again complains about another demo, that instead of information the band sent a naive drawing of a sailboat. He does compare the band to the Razorcuts in this occasion.
Then Musikon, the guide for Swedish music. Here I was to find out that in 1987, Per Rosenberg and Lars Oskarsson had been involved with a punk band called The Join who had released a 7″ EP titled “Total Tystnad”. On the other hand, Jörgen Gustafsson had been involve back in 1985 on a band called Ego Boys who released an LP titled “Bevara Kättjan”. Magnus Öberg, the drummer for a time in the band, had been involved in many more bands, like Ramm, Shredhead, Kevlar and Starmarket.
But probably the best ever find I could hope was an old, very old, Honeymoons website that I found through the Scandinavian Indie mailing list. Here we find the last ever lineup for the band:
Markus Bäckström – Drums
Jörgen Gustafsson – Organ and Sounds
Lars Oskarsson – Bass
Peter Rosenberg – Vocals and Guitar
Petter Sandström – Guitar and Vocals
I notice of course that there’s a new member, Petter, since 1997. Other good info found is that the band formed in spring 1990 at a garden party. Their first ever gig was at a party held by psychology students. Then we know that there was a video for the song “Travel”. Don’t think this video is on Youtube sadly.
In 1997 we have some gigs listed: Festival Lycksele on May 24th, Provinssirock Seinäjoki Finland on June 15th, O-ringen in Umeå on July 23rd and 24th and Nolia in Umeå on August 9th.
Other news are that their records were to be licensed for the Philippines that year.
On the Scandinavian Indie mailing list there’s also a mentions saying: Honeymoons – release their long sought after second “real” album called “This Coherent Excitation” on April 21st. A single from the album called “Fabrications” is released on April 1st. The band spent last weekend in Stockholm in order to record a video and do a photo shoot with Urban Ström and Johan Markusson. So I wonder, where’s that video? I would like to see it! And lastly I do find a review of the “Fabrications” CD single on the list by Erik Söderström. Something I took from there is that the band played in Linköping at J’s Place sometime between 1993 and 1994.
And that’s where I stop. The band, even though having released a bunch of records, disappear into thin air. It doesn’t seem the band members continued making music afterwards aside from the drummer, Öberg. That’s strange. I wonder if they ever go to Japan, where their records found their way. What about the promo videos they made? How many were they and how come they are not on the web yet? If they have more unreleased material? There are many questions, and little answers this time. Do you remember them?
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Listen
Honeymoons – Pale Sun
