SF0200 Festive Forthy 2025 Pt 2, #27-15

SF0200 Festive Forthy 2025 Pt 2, #27-15

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A mixed bag, in the best sense, for Part 2 of this year’s roundup.

Some musical strains prove surprisingly resilient to infection, so to speak. ‘Fabulist’ by The Cords could have been recorded in 1986 and indeed bears all the hallmarks of a band who have worn out a copy of their C86 cassette. In their blurb they claim there’s something special happening in Inverkip. Just an hour west from Glasgow, it’s a quaint village home to a beach, a really good ice cream shop and your favourite new band. The Cords are Eva and Grace Tedeschi – two sisters brought even closer together through their shared love for groups like The Umbrellas, The Cure, BMX Bandits and Heavenly.

Whatever happened to dub reggae? Well, one of its futures has been mapped out by the artist Pachyman, featured with his track ‘SJU’. He’s a Puerto Rico-born, Los Angeles-based musician and has immersed himself in the methodology of genre masters like King Tubby and The Scientist. He uses vintage gear, constructing glorious walls of sound, and has developed an intuitive understanding of the power of repetition.

Gumshoes, by contrast, is a homespun indie pop project based in the UK. Chronically ill singer-songwriter Sam Sparks writes peppy melodies and whimsical tales, featuring a cast of eccentrics, losers and fools. We welcome eccentrics, losers and fools on Sombrero Fallout and his track ‘Cockroach Song’ sits proudly at #21.

Pitchfork, in its inimitable style, had this to say about our #18 track. On ‘Cinderella’, over harmonics that blare like an emergency siren, he (singer Cole Hayden) sings about the time when, at age five, he almost asked for a Cinderella-themed birthday party. “And when the moment came and I changed my mind/I was quiet, alone, and devastated.” Even now, in adulthood, that internalized rejection stings his drive for intimacy.” Whatever, a cracking track – hard to describe its genre – postpunk meets Einsturzende Neubaten, possibly. I fail to see Pitchfork’s detection of a Britney Spears vibe; and am reluctant to dig deeper into the Spears canon.

Daily Toll are from Sydney. Great to have Australia represented for the first time, even if it’s not a Melbourne band. (Let’s wait and see whether that will be fixed before the end of this year’s Festive Forthy.) ‘Bell Jar Convenience’, a song with a title most likely influenced by the Sylvia Plath novel, offers quite literally a change of speed. They also offer the lead singer with this year’s best name: Kata Szasz-Komlos.

Kathryn Mohr is at #16, and is perhaps the most idiosyncratic artist here. Her album, ‘Waiting Room’, was written and self-recorded over the course of a month in eastern Iceland, within the walls of a disused fish factory, surrounded by remote nature. She spent hours in a windowless concrete room lit with a string of multi-coloured light bulbs, taking breaks to wander the factory or disappear up the shoreline, field recorder in hand. The track we’ve chosen here concerns the cheery subject of limb amputation by a faulty elevator. But all the lyrics are as mazelike and misguided as the torturous love and fears they depict.

I was in two minds about selecting a song by the last artist, Saya Gray, but was persuaded to do so by my son Alex. He returned from the Meredith Festival with the conclusion that she was the best act he’d seen there. But he was also keen to stress that by far the most interesting tracks live were not the singles. And since I have limited time that was all I’d listened to at that point. However, further investigation into the album did indeed reveal far more rewarding musical diversions. One such example is the track featured here, ‘Line Back 22’.

Many other great selections which you can explore to your heart’s content.