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30dayHex, CDR

The first song is Instant Wish. It’s like My Bloody Valentine turned the volume down and strung themselves out with Lithium. The next is Picture Perfect. It’s like My Bloody Valentine turned the volume down and played through a horrendous Lithium hangover. I haven’t got to the third song yet, these two are on repeat. www.30dayhex.co.uk

This Years Model CDR

I am a grammatical pedant. I can live with this fact and I am still able to put Casualties by This Years Model in my CD player. I am a musical pedant. I can also live with this fact but I am unable to listen to the tedious indie guitar overfamiliarity of Casualties for longer than it takes me to type this review. (And I temped as a typist.) thisyearsmodel_@hotmail.com

Clear Red CDR

Clear Red are best when they sound like the Blue Aeroplanes on Ballad of an Actor – scuffed-up folk-pop with intriguing spoken vocals. Clear Read are worst when they sound like an out-of-sorts Dylan on Only the Truth – scuffed-up folk-pop with unintriguing grunted vocals. clear_read@msn.com

Riders, It’s Ready To Come TAPE

I fell in love with Sweden’s By Coastal Café (posthumous single out now on Kitchen Records, dillonL8@aol.com) because of the ingenious, ingenuous charm of their prodigious demo output. After they split, Marilyn went to art school and Martin moved to New York and hooked up with Amy to become Riders. Thankfully, Riders have the same happy knack of stuffing everything that’s good about a song into a minute or so and then stopping. A fragile guitar, mini-poetry and cardboard box drums dumped straight to Dictaphone, a moment of magic captured forever and basking in the tape-to-tape hiss. I think I’m falling in love again. riders@nycmail.com

Atlas, CDR

Atlas, a mountain to climb. (All I ever aspired to be was sub-editor on a local newspaper.) Bury St Edmunds band Atlas provide half-a-dozen songfuls of guts and energy and half a songful of song over these two tracks which, apart from the keyboard stabs, are the kind of thing you’d sleep through at any pub in Camden every night of the week. But, and this is why I keep delving into the demo bag, when they channel this edgy adrenalin rush into songs that haven’t been written a thousand times before, I could be printing on page 19 of the Cambridge Evening News: Atlas, on the road to success. atlas@resistanceisfutile.co.uk

Razor Bianca, Vs The Poncho Pilots CDR

The exceptionally enthusiastic review on the inside sleeve first disparages Slayer in favour of Razor Bianca before putting the band on a pedestal fashioned from the best bits of Bowie, The Clash and Magazine. It’s hard to agree. I’d go more for Ludicrous Lollipops (a little-known Coventry band who dabbled with the Two-Tone/Fraggle fringe) trying to embrace emo and, on best track here, The Word "Human", dub down before rocking out. I think this is generally a positive review. www.razorbianca.com

Sokay, CDR

Do you remember when Suede were all the rage? (More interestingly if less relevantly, do you remember when Suede was all the rage? If so, reminisce for a few minutes before reading the rest of the magazine. Careless Talk Costs Lives brings you this enjoyable intermission free of charge.) Suede, the band, unfortunately rolled the snowball that became an avalanche of repressed histrionic dullard guitar bands with pretensions to grandeur, a book by Kerouac and the belief that they had something interesting to say. Sokay are the last few flakes of snow coming to rest just short of the chalet. www.sokay.co.uk

Neenor, CDR

This isn’t how a band called Neenor should sound. Neenor should be a dark rush of dangerous inner city beats, basslines from back alleys at midnight and a town centre’s worth of screaming sirens. Listening to Neenor should be like being defibrillated during orgasm on the best acid trip of your life while holding the winning lottery ticket, watching re-runs of The Sweeney and having your head smashed in by Vinnie Jones’ bulldog. It should be. But it isn’t. Listening to Neenor is, in fact, like wondering just what kind of weird sex David Gedge and Lloyd Cole had to have to become the parents of this band. www.neenor.co.uk

Arkon Daraul, CDR

Arkan Daraul bring to mind dick Dale at about 3rpm surrounded by the things that live in the back of your imagination and only come out in the early hours when you’re woken by the sound of something rattling against the window in the spare room. Echoing atmospherics, the scuttling of many-legged creatures and the slow twang of a man that’s been there and done it. We’ll have some more of this, please. steven.hanson@virgin.net

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