Let’s Buy Happiness must have bought up the whole darn shop as ‘Fast Fast‘ is a joyous 3 minutes of perfect pop. The sound of winter melting away and a great record guaranteed to warm the cockles of your heart…and that’s a medical fact!

I’ve been waiting decades for someone to form a great guitar band that combines good story telling with analogue arcade synth sounds. I would have done it myself, but I don’t have any musical talent. So thank god the Jukebox Collective came along with Lost and Found.

In a sea of eighties revivalists, Fools Wish sounds perfectly natural and bang up to date. The Kill Van Kulls have taken all the best bits of the 80s like classic synths and big drums and woven them into a totally contemporary wall of sound. In describing the Kill Van Kulls music, I’m sure that ‘dark and brooding’ will become overused in the years to come…so I’m getting in early and using it now. Fools Wish totally transports you to the dark side of love. Quite brilliant.

There is going to be no mention at all of shoegaze anywhere in this review of Spotlight Kid. I mean what do you think we are…lazy music journalists? No way, we’d never slip into easy clichés when it comes to describing new music. You can bet Spotlight Kid don’t want to be pigeonholed either. There’s a lot more to the sound of Spotlight Kid than….than that genre that everyone else keeps mentioning! Hell…they even sounded a bit J&MC at one point, so definitely not shoegaze…ok! Right I think you get the idea by now. All Is Real is a brilliant single – a breakneck 4 and a half minutes with a wall of guitars, way-out-there vocals and just a hint of feedback here and there. Superb.

On And On has an effortless Californian West Coast USA vibe to it. Think America, mid period Beach Boys, that sort of thing. So that’s  quite an achievement when you consider that Fossil Collective are from the North East of England! On And On is the most beautiful piece of music we’ve heard this week, and we like it so much it went on repeat 6 time in a row. There’s also a stunning video from Broken Pixel. Layers of guitar, piano, flutes and a squishy driving bass means that there’s always something new to hear. Blissful dreamy pop. A true gem.