The Heavenly Option

Where once Heavenly grabbed the excitable post-punk of Girls At Our Best! and the pop bite of Altered Images to stamp their mark on indiepop, bands are now taking the Heavenly option as a jumping-off point for their own thrills.

Leaving Mornington Crescent
This Swedish band have the Amelia Fletcher style of primary school assembly vocals and the stop-start guitar pop pretty much perfect and, on Keep Your Hands Off Me, they get the handclap-fuelled girl group pop and melodrama spot on – all in under 50 seconds(!). Their talents, plentiful as they are on their top songs, are stretched a little thinly at times over the six tracks of the Corners ep, but stick this band in a gro-bag and in six months’ time they could be as good as The Aislers Set once were. They’re getting close.

Meow Meow!
This new Liverpool trio ram raid the Go Sailor and All Girl Summer Fun Band back catalogues and crash it into late 70s powerpop with such brio that it’s surely only a matter of time before K Records open their chequebook. With a song called One Crazy Summer which opens with the line “I fell in love with a boy, thought it would last forever” you know they’ve been studying the Amelia Fletcher copybook.

Sourpatch
This Californian quartet trade in a superior line of snappy melodies and punky pop with dizzying, driving guitars that take more from those 7” masterpieces by Velocity Girl and Small Factory than they do from Heavenly; but I did see Small Factory play at least four gigs with Heavenly in 1992, so it all fits together and thrives on the same spirit. There’s a free ep from wiaiwya and an album due soon on HHBTM.

Tender Trap oh shut up granddad have another werther’s original the new bands are the best