Before Local Sports Team even began I’d had the idea of someday calling an EP ‘Latvia’; a country with which I had no connection, experience, or knowledge of beyond the atlas-confirmed fact that it existed. I just liked the sound of the word: Latvia. The band formed, we scraped together a handful of songs and enough cash to record them, and that nice sounding word again suggested itself.

After the EP’s release, we were almost instantly discovered by Click And Listen It; a music blog ran by an honest-to-God actual Latvian. “Holy mathafacka!” he tweeted, “this is insane!” – we sent him a copy, he reviewed it, we went to the pub and the idea of asking him for a gig in Riga became obvious. We didn’t think it would go much further than that, but the answer came back positive.

Some months down the line, we gathered at Gatwick Airport, slightly terrified that the airline wouldn’t let us board the plane with our guitars. They just about did, and we were soon checking into our hostel in Riga. The beers were cheap, the first one was actually free. We agreed to attend a pub crawl alongside some friendly Brazilians, a Dutch man who insisted we call him Jesus, and his friend with whom Andy had a long conversation about minimal techno. I sang All The Small Things at karaoke.

We woke the next morning with fuzzy heads and dry throats, and ventured out to actually see a bit of Riga whilst we were there. We scaled the heights of a church tower, marvelled at the architecture, Instagramming the city below to heck. We wandered the vast indoor markets housed in former zeppelin hangars. We drank coffee. We got paranoid that the humour in our Soviet font WORK HARD t-shirts might not come across so good. We decided instead to wear tourist t-shirts, proclaiming our love for the city of Riga and the country of Latvia.

It was time to gig. We found the venue, and said hello to everyone. We were shown to an actual dressing room. We were fed, and supplied with a stack of vouchers for beer at the bar. The other bands seemed excited about the free bottled water. We paced ourselves.

Our set went as well as could be expected. People watched us, and some of them danced. I’m not 100% they got the humour in our I LOVE LATVIA t-shirts. We sold one CD. One person asked if he could swap some cigarettes for a copy. We declined. Another asked if he could swap some weed for a copy. We declined. I talked with him about Battles and Let’s Wrestle. The most tedious man in Riga claimed to be the Latvian Billy Idol, and told us for 40 minutes that whilst our music was ‘ideal’ our image was ‘no good’. Grow mohawks he told us, and wear sunglasses. He didn’t see any humour in the I LOVE LATVIA t-shirts.

We spent the rest of the night chatting to the support bands in the dressing room. We were told that our music was weird, but given no clarity if that was A Good Thing. Conversation turned to international topics; the computer game Minecraft (of which I have no knowledge) and the comedy of Borat. We were shown videos of corpses, taken by medical students. We said good night, and took Shane for a McDonalds. He’d been very good all weekend, and he deserved a treat.

http://localsportsteam.bandcamp.com/‎

The older you get, the more ground down by life’s disappointments and repetition you become, the more you need pop music, and especially pop music like this. A sweet three minute dose is still sunlight through drawn curtains, still a step away from sadness, a bubble that can’t be burst. The School are from Cardiff, and bandleader Liz Hunt has been pretty adept the last few years at writing bruised and classy takes on ’60s girl group shimmer. Songs like ‘All I Wanna Do’ and ‘Let It Slip’ take all the joy and worry of being in love, strip them into universal language then blast them back through chunky keyboard piano and fake strings, pocket symphonies on minimal budgets. Always underrated in their hometown, The School shouldn’t just appeal to those who take a knitted swimsuit to ATP; go tell the strangers at the bus stop this band are seriously swoonworthy.

Recorded in north Wales with albino sex guru David Wrench, these four tracks show a new shine to their polka dot dresses, and may be their best work yet. ‘Never Thought I’d See The Day’ rides in on a perfectly queasy organ bounce and threads it between perky guitar peals and just right backing ‘oohs’. It has a sort of cutesy roar that powers it with great poise to the end, all kinds of light hearted, addictive sparks flying off. No idea how much effort it takes to make this effervescence looks so effortless. A switched gender Jonathan Richman cover becomes ‘When He Kisses Me’, another lop-sided grin of Vitamin D. The keyboard piano is super-chunky, madly tuneful, the beat lollops like dopey lovers, and all is well within its plucked strings, shouts and call-outs. They give a weird kind of dignity to Richman’s childman capering while dosing it with fun – a pretty neat trick. The keyboard turns clipped and stoic for ‘Where Does Your Heart Belong?’, a strength-in-heartbreak number with recorder shadowing the vocal lines and a nice Beach Boys desolation feel. The chorus gently unfurls into some Bacharach brass, and it’s all quite swish. ‘I Wouldn’t Know What To Do’, originally by The Honeydrips (me neither), relaxes things further. Not much more than vocals over acoustic guitar, woodblock and xylophone, it hovers briefly in the air like some Velocette ghost. Which is another way of saying: The School have the tunes to justify being part of a brilliant girl group-inspired lineage, and the skills to escape any twee indie ghetto you might want to put them in. This single’s for anyone who ever had a heart, and it’s to be cherished.

http://theschoolband.blogspot.co.uk/

http://elefant.com/en/disco/15349/Never%20Thought%20I’d%20See%20The%20Day

Any dolt can turn things up to 11. Forget your plugs at a Big Joan gig and you will get the morning after ring, but you will also see a band who’ll only cave your eardrum in at exactly the right moment, and only as part of a visceral mangling of the rock format, having turned it more nasty, sexy and raw than most other dullards. One of Bristol’s best noisemakers, they also have, in Annette Berlin, something of a trump card, if pictures on trump cards show great singers: her Teutonic tones range from fiery ranting to kittenish evil to cool cruelty. She’s the Euro auteur element added to the band’s film noir rumble, which plays with space, texture and volume, yielding a lot through bass prowl, synth creep and psychotic guitar. ‘The Long, Slow Death Of…’ is the second Big Joan album and sounds lush, Berlin-via-Bristol’s Anton Maiovvi’s mix job creating a brilliantly sleek cloud of dense and ever present danger.

Opener ‘(They Call Him) Johnny’ is terrific, an echoed-up Berlin jabbering imperiously over a crotchety, ready to crack backing. The twin points when the guitar crashes in on a sick screech of feedback are so good you want to gulp them down forever. The album’s chocka with stuff like this, of songs that edge in on tick tock bass and drums then grow fat on simple, gory guitar lines. Taken down a notch, you have the great ‘Funeral’, where a lonely keyboard pulses like a broken fluoro tube before waves of static ooze from the speakers like mouth breathing ghosts. But back up the scale you get ’888′, where whipsmart guitar, nonsense vocal babble and Mclusky bass rise together in concentrated bursts of pyrotechnics, or ‘Show’, which is totally A-grade: ringmaster vox giving way to extended, madly overdubbed guitar joy before rejoining the crazed fray for more derangement, barking out “you’re just a fucking clown” at the death. It’s a thrill. And you can do a zombie death dance to closing belter ‘Bin1′, a percussive, Pig Bag-style instrumental with a stormtrooper guitar line and their onstage trashcan whacked from all angles. ‘The Long, Slow Death Of…’ steamrollers you with brilliance. Get down and stay down.

http://bigjoan.bandcamp.com/album/the-long-slow-death-of-big-joan

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Big-Joan/52465257199

http://bloodredsounds.blogspot.com/

It’s Joan Wasser rather than Joan As Policewoman who defines tonight. In a slashed leather catsuit, she exudes that quality that makes you want to go out and get shitfaced with her, falling down and licking the floor drunk. Between song patter is giddy with happiness, at odds with some of her more austere recorded material, and more fitting to the easy rolling, tightly coiled jazzsoul numbers that strut from the stage. A typically starry-eyed anecdote about Al Green makes sense: to a JAP novice like myself Wasser seems to be revelling in the same libidinous, slick soft funk. Occasional stark moments have Wasser alone under spotlights, bare guitar or keyboard adding sharp edges, like a shoulder blade seen through a leather slash, to the sometimes dinner party oozing. The tide of bonhomie is too hard to resist though – the backing band may pull orgasmic sexfunk faces but are total dudes, the crowd are nicely vocal, pirate noises and all, and Joan herself is utterly lovable, so full of slanted humour and mad grins she could be barfing into pint glasses and people would still sing along. Yeah, we’re far from badsex indie music here.