Korova, Camp Actor, Smokers Die Younger, Popular Workshop, Misterlee, Flipron, Das Wanderlust, Circus of Death
What Will Survive Of Us...

Coventry’s Tough Love Records is one year old this July, and in commemoration of the anniversary they’ve decided – hurrah! – to release a compilation CD. Featuring nineteen bands, some from the Tough Love stables and some from further afield, it’s a gathering of the tuneful, the quirky and the boisterous – and here, in my opinion, are some particular highlights…

Das Wanderlust ensure that things start with a bang: their high-speed, shouty girl-punk is a mixture of the better bits of early Placebo and pre-school riot-girlers ripping up the musical section of the nursery. More female-fronted noise, this time of the more angular rock persuasion, comes from Chaos Emeralds, who mix shouting-girl attack-punk with funk-infused verses and handclaps aplenty. Rather more mournful, though still with a vein of humour, is the contribution from Smokers Die Younger, whose ‘Kermit Song’ offers both an interesting glimpse of their pre-album sound and a most enjoyable, rather odd and strangely affecting indie-basics number: creaking keyboards, very deliberate bass and an explosive chorus.

Speeding things back up, Popular Workshop make a most-welcome appearance with their stop-start-shout high-intensity punk – evocative stuff which is pleasingly full of odd randomnesses, from a band who manage to both be typical of a genre and instantly recognisable as themselves. The low-impact, strumming-and-vocals intro of Korova’s 'Bad Poetry' is soon belied by the song’s explosion into an aching cacophony of cymbals, distortion and perversely appropriate violin – this lot really are rather special.

And here are some other noteworthies in the forms of: Camp Actor, who like their electro melodramatic and stomping and who may well appeal to those who find subtlety an excessive indulgence; the crescendoing 80s pop-repetition of Circus of Death; the soothing, synthetic-psychedelica oddity of MisterLee’s 'Magnesium Horses'; and Flipron with the dark, piano-based narrative of ‘The Vicious Car and Love Poem’. Diversity: ‘tis a mighty thing.

Oh: and if you like indie-pop, either of the fey and jangling or of the angular kicking-out variety, you’ll find more of it here than you can shake a gladioli at…