Local Features

Like a musical self-help manual, with plonky acoustic notes and glockenspiel taps Baskin’ sounds like a Broadcast 2000 pep talk. A song wrapped in child-like simplicity and words of barefaced encouragement that ‘life is yours’. Bad moods are unwelcome here...

Spring Break sounds – and I’m sorry but you can blame the music for making me write this nonsense - like a load of Girl Scouts going on a soft metal camping holiday. It’s fantastic and basic and does what all great pop does, shakes you to the core with its ridiculously overheated, panting, doe-eyed, hateful simplicity.

In some ways this is a band that is coming to terms riding their own genre and decade-hopping sound. The record’s restlessness can be both its strength and its weakness, and there are times where you are wondering what is coming next but just enjoying the music for the hell of it.

And, as befits two members of seminal Dutch avant garde band Minny Pops, we also get a Minny Pops track – Kogel – but one stripped of its icy punch and replaced with a sort of abstract, Arabic funk.

...this record creates an imaginary world of its own, conjuring up spells at will, hell-bent on a strange kind of enchantment. There are some great songs on here.

It’s very girly stuff, lots of dreamy songs… falling in love on New Year’s Eve, songs called After School…  but the arrangements and sense of touch are tremendous; it’s difficult to listen to this and feel you’re being conned or having to excuse the band any failings or dishonesty

There’s a rich, confident atmosphere throughout, and frankly the track listing means sack-all in that it’s such a well-balanced record. You can dip in and enjoy it at any point.

Personally I think he’s at his best when he adds a bit of swagger and dumb optimism and stops trying to act twice his age.

That’s what we are all asked to do in this modern world: plug in, leave a message, and turn off. Minny Pops just sound-tracked and defined this feeling before most others did.

It’s unbelievable that a crabby old listener like me can fall for this sugar-coated dream stuff: but I do.

There are lots of squeaks, creaks, groans and taps which allow the listener to conjure up an image of a dirty room in a backwoods, battered, wind lashed part of Twente or Friesland.

Ah, The Moon is Big.  These nine songs of grandeur and crackpot simplicity - by turns insidiously familiar yet frustratingly remote - are weighed down by their spiritual forefathers.

the angst in the record feels real, and thank fuck, we don’t have any of that “softly, softly look at me with my clever instruments while I play a lullaby” nonsense that seems to have overwhelmed this genre recently.

I kept thinking of an emo Dexys Midnight Runners when I first heard S As In Assassins

The whole LP is an exercise in pushing a limited set of sounds through a number of hoops, and with that in mind, it maintains its vibe brilliantly.

...this band could if they so wished make something really powerful and interesting, no doubt

You do feel you are walking the fog-laden streets, going to a meeting of The Golden Dawn or some such…

A synth-led duo from Perth Australia living and recording in Leiden, Holland. Beat that.

It’s an okay pop record by an act that could probably do a lot more if they tried stopping to please & used less phraseology.

I’m guessing that his dad likes Jonathan Richman and lots of stuff like Joe Jackson or Beach Boys: in essence sunny and honest, open-hearted pop.