Just tidying up our email and came across this good ‘un. No idea where people find us, but there’s a steady stream of tuneage passes through our inbox each day. Wish we could find time to write about more. The interesting bit, for a hack used to being well and truly PR’ed, is how people approach you in these DIY times. All strength to lot of you, but you can usually tell when something is going to be any good from the email.

Anyway, Rattle Pop’s Mark seems to have got it just about right, even if he did call us My Favourite New Band, which is a Hives album… or is that an Hive’s album. My favourite new band is a very different thing to my new favourite band.

He emailed us, then followed up a week later. Which made us feel guilty. We’d listened to the track, liked it, but not had time to write anything. That second email worked a treat. Not that we’re suggesting you mail us every day until we crack, but a gentle nudge never goes amiss.

Much of the stuff we get is generic, you know that it’s just been pumped out to a thousand other blogs, so anyone who has taken the time to even include the name of our site in a mail and we’re all ears. In our little pea brained world it seems to say that it’s us specifically they want writing about their band. Call us vein, but flattery always works a treat. Or maybe they’ve got a programme that strips names out of blogs and adds them to blanket emails…

So anyway, we like Dumb, the one track we’ve heard at least. There’s lots we like about this offering from the Birmingham four-piece. There’s the can-hardly-be-arsed singing of Dylan Williams, a lazy Edwin Collins, the way it wastes no time rattling along for a minute or so in a kind of Buffalo Tom sort of way, then it gets all twangy in a Vampire Weekend-y/Everything Everything-y way for the blink of an eye and then it’s straight back to the noise. And we always like a drummmer from the school of why-hit-one-drum-when-five-will-do. You’ve got ‘em right? They all need hitting.

We would also like to officially apologise for the headline. It’s not up to our usual standard and we wanted to make a lame Dumbo joke. If anyone can think of anything better, we’re happy to change it.

More hear…
- Their debut single, see above, is out 31 March on One Beat Records.
- You’ll find Mark Rattle Pop here.
- No sign of a site, Twitter, Facebook, no nuffink. Which we quite like if we’re honest.