Happy new year to everyone!! Hope this 2020 brings lots of good news to all, more great indiepop records, gigs and bands to all of us. For Cloudberry I really hope it is a good year. Last year we put one retrospective and 2 7″s. Hopefully this year we can do the same or more. That’s the plan at least! This year for sure we are adding a fanzine, that already makes it different!
Have I found any good music in the past few days?
Nah…: “Perfect Game” is the treat the German band is giving us for 2020! It is a song about darts & love and it is darn good! Very influenced by Orange Juice, the jangly track gallops and swoons. It is one of their finest moments and so I hope they release this physically this year!
Golden Teardrops: another band that treats us with new music in 2020 is the duo of Ryan and Lei Marquez! They have a new song “I Won’t Be Fooled Again” that continues what they have been releasing in the past few years. Another great entry to their catalogue of shiny summery songs.
Jetstream Pony: our favourite Brightonians cover 20/20’s “Yellow Pills” for New Year’s. And they do it great! What do I wish the band for 2020? I hope they release more records. Maybe an album. And definitely to come play NYC!
Dummy: a five people band from Los Angeles. That’s all I know about them. They have a self-titled EP supposedly (their artwork looks like a tape with 3 songs on the A side and 2 on the B side), but on Bandcamp I can only find one track, “Angel’s Gear”. It is terrific, so I hope to hear the rest. If it exists!
Tawings: this trio from Tokyo released a few weeks ago a self-titled album consisting of 8 tracks. Dreampop and shoegaze fans will definitely enjoy this, with it’s sweet melodies and dreamy female vocals. The record is available on CD now.
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This might be a short post because I think this is one of those ultra obscure bands that no information is available on the web. And that’s kind of funny as the one and only song I know by Alphabet Extravaganza was released not THAT long ago, in 2007. Not in the 80s. There was internet then. But still there’s nothing about them online.
This one and only song I know they recorded was called “Don’t Pay Attention”. It has female vocals and the sound of it reminds me a lot of the Marine Girls. So yes, it is pretty nice.
The song wasn’t even released in physical format. It was part of an MP3 compilation released by the Swedish label Friendly Noise called “I Godan Ro” (FYN 51). This Stockholm based label was founded by Stefan Zachrisson and Mattias Holmberg and released some very good albums, among my favourite those by The Dreamers and Action Biker.
This compilation included four songs. The Alphabet Extravaganza was the second one in the tracklist. The other bands were We Feed Them Knives, Kim Ki O and The Radio Dept. (doing a glorious version of the Go-Betweens’ “Bachelor Kisses”). The songs were compiled by Per Johansson who had once been in the amazing band Kissing Mirrors.
Aside from all of these connections, I can’t find who was behind the band. I can’t find other songs either. So, I need your help as it would be nice to hear more songs by Alphabet Extravaganza!
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