THESE should be the summer nights when joyful, good-to-be-alive music should be dancing across your sound system and the moonlit night can end on the porch in beautiful reflection.
Summer nights when you play Cornershop’s exhilarating cultural hotchpotch Urban Turban or the pure indie pop of London-Aussie four-piece Allo Darlin’. Play them anyway, in defiance of this endless rain. Cornershop’s album is subtitled The Singles Club, not because that is its target audience but because the tracks began life as a run of singles, each with guest vocalists, be they a Swedish, French or Punjabi songstress or Lancashire primary school singers on the insanely infectious new nursery rhyme What Did The Hippie Have In His Bag? Even more brimful of fuzzy tunefulness is Soko’s Something Makes You Feel. Hip hop, pop, Indian folk roots, you will find it all in this Cornershop.
Allo Darlin’ takes a narrower path through indie-pop’s past and present, albeit with the added bonus of Aussie singer-songwriter Elizabeth Morris favouring the ukulele, especially on the solo Tallulah. “The songs have an awareness of a darker place but end up coming out the other side,” she says. Just like this confounded summer.
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