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Various: Dark Was The Night

Passion Pit: Sleepyhead (EP track)

Betty & The Werewolves: David Cassidy 7”

Crystal Stilts: Love is a Wave 7”

Sin Fang Bous: Clamour (album)

Nodzzz: s/t (12” LP)

Love Is All: A Hundred Things Keep Me Up At Night (album)

Sons of Noel and Adrian: A Wreck Is Not A Ship (track)

Slow Down Tallahassee/ Standard Fare: split 7”

Piney Gir & The Age of Reason Of All The Wonderful Things (single)

Navvy: Idyll Intangible (album)

Various: Cathedral Classics Vol 1 (Sonic Cathedral comp)

Fanfarlo: Reservoir (album)

Camera Obscura: My Maudlin Career (album)
 

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Album Review

Various Artists Still Unravished – A Tribute to the June Brides
Yesboyicecream Records

Article written by Ged M
May 14, 2006.

Tribute records are a tricky thing to pull off: too similar to the originals and it sounds like respectful karaoke, too different and you lose the connection. It’s especially difficult when Cherry Red have just compiled a double album of all the best June Brides songs. So is this tribute album worth it? The answer’s a defiant yes. For a start, the current interest in the Junies compensates for the relative neglect when they were around in 1984-85. The careering guitars, sweetly downcast vocals and the touch of Stax soul should have made them big fish in the indie pool but the NME pondkeepers put them on the cover one week and to the back of their minds the next. Listening to ‘Still Unravished’ you notice that they have a much imitated sound.

The album is a mix of styles, from the heavy (Manic Street Preachers’ ‘The Instrumental’) to the twee (House of Mexico doing ‘Sick, Tired and Drunk’), and a mix of bands from the Jasmine Minks to Jeffrey Lewis. A song as memorable as ‘Every Conversation’ needs a dramatic retelling if it’s not to be a pale copy of the original, so The Positions add ethereal female vocals and wreathe it in synths so that it sounds alike yet unique. Television Personalities, the band that influenced Phil Wilson and Simon Beezley to start their group, turn ‘I Fall’ upside down with treated vocals, melodica and surgical drumming. The two versions of ‘Heard You Whisper’ are both great in their own right: the Projects ladle on the synths and effects in the spirit of the Junies’ trumpet and viola; Tompaulin offer Jamie’s whispery vocals, sawtoothed guitar rhythms and synths fizzing like a stirred up wasp nest.

The worst thing on this record is the Legend!’s murder of ‘This Town’. The Legend! is a former generation’s Spinmaster Plantpot, a man who ought to have an ASBO to prevent him approaching a microphone. His singing is as criminal as child porn, and his offence is worse for the damage inflicted on such a great song. As bad as that version is, the karmic balance is restored by the amazing ‘Pound for Pound’ by the Tyde. With its sauntering rhythms and vocals by Darren that echo Phil Wilson’s downbeat worldview, it channels the spirit of the June Brides from 20 years ago; here’s hoping The Tyde add it to their live set.

This is a great tribute: songs that stand up in their own right but also take you back to the originals too. Buy it alongside Cherry Red’s compilation to make your own tribute to an unfairly overlooked band.

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