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Single/Download Review

The Blanche Hudson Weekend, Horowitz and others
Oddbox Singles Club (Part 1) Oddbox Records 3x7”

Article written by Ged M - Jun 7, 2011

When labels gain a particular profile, they’re sometimes bold enough to launch a Singles Club, like SubPop and Kindercore, trading on their name as a sign of quality. Oddbox seem to have also reached that point, with twenty or so releases in various shades of indiepop as well as running gigs and clubs. The general quality of the initial Singles Club releases suggests that Oddbox has now developed a dependable sound and roster.

For early subscribers there’s a pack of bag and badges, three vinyl singles plus a clever code for the download of all the songs on MP3. Through that you can also find an MP3 bonus from the Humms, ‘The Armadillo Tango’, a superb mutated Joe Meek instrumental that shudders with guitar reverb. On the records themselves, the first single matches the Blanche Hudson Weekend’s melodic JAMC noise (‘If You’re Still Together’) with Horowitz’s fuzzier superpoppy ‘Get Cleansed!’ Disc 2 marries two tunes from cheeky London indiepoppers the Give It Ups, both of which are about unrequited love for a boy but are sung from the perspective of, respectively, a girl (the punkette-pop ‘Why Won’t You Go Out With Me?’) and a guy (the excellent ‘Knives Chau’), with bubblegum pop in the form of ‘False Start, My Heart’ from Santa Monica Swim and Dive Team, an offshoot of Saturday Looks Good To Me.

The quiffed and leathered One Fathom Down describe themselves “like a threeway between Dick Dale, Poison Ivy and Link Wray”and their ‘Supercritical Ocean’ (on the third single) is a grumbling guitar instrumental while ‘Breaking The Law’, apart from using the coolest sample ever, is both a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it tribute to the Judas Priest song and also a brilliant surf-rock tune. Meanwhile the Humms’ ‘Jupiter’ is very different to anything that’s gone before, an intensely poetic acoustic strumalong that bristles with menace.

Three singles in (another three to come in September), the Oddbox Singles Club delivers quality tunes in a spiffing presentation and announces that, like the label’s owner, Oddbox is now a big presence on the indiepop scene.

Links:
http://oddboxrecords.com/
http://soundcloud.com/oddbox