Sissy And The Blisters, Blisters

Sissy And The Blisters straddles that fine line between too much buzz and unfairly dissed because of it. It's especially true in the United Kingdom, where the band came together in Gilford two years ago.

True, the band sports a look to fit the part. True, they tread some old and familiar ground. True, they've been compared to just about everybody. And also true, taking turns on an organ is a great gimmick.

But then there is always the other side. You know the one. The one that wonders what if it isn't an act.

Sissy and The Blisters breaks for better ground on Let Her Go.

Back in November, when the band put out their first single, Things May Change, I scratched my head. It was good, but nothing like their real debut from a month earlier. It was released as part of the In The City Unsigned Collection, which featured 20 interesting and addictive alternative artists.

The song, The Wolf, is still one of my favorite tracks ever recorded by Sissy and The Blisters. It knocks back some of the critiques that their lack of a bass player makes the band overtly tiny moot.

James Geard is the bass. His deep and unrelenting voice leaps the song forward and through the wall. He belts his vocals out like a boxer, pummeling anything that gets in the way. It's rockabilly with a punk attitude and skinny jeans. And all it comes across on Let Her Go.


Another reason some critics don't like them — aside from Steve Lamacq and John Kennedy — is that the band is generally short on words and big on clown around conversations about whatever comes up. Doing so puts more emphasis on the music as opposed to who they are or other inspired platitudes.

Who they are is simple enough to figure out. Geard is the guy with the deep voice. Nick Benton and Jack James are the cause of the crashing guitars. Ed Kirwan is in the back, banging the drums.

The best track on Let Her Go is You Girl. The clever pop-fun lyrics are delivered with all the urgency of garage rock and weight of psychedelic rock. The lo-fi sound only adds appeal, over and over again. That and the feeling that this is what punk might sound like if someone had jumped on it in the 1950s.

When you take that all in and add the anti-shoe gazing performances that ignite these guys on a live stage, it's hard to beat back what is going on here behind the buzz. These guys are into making music, the kind that easily finds a niche between finger snaps and overproduced theatrics. It's real.

Definitely pick up You Girl and Let Her Go off the EP. And then add in The Wolf off the collection mentioned. Got No Home carries the energy, but Geard sounds too singsongy at times and the organ gets a bit too carnival. Sleeping Around At Night hits that 1950s sentiment too much, with a little surf chords tossed into the mix. Mystics makes for a great moody starter that busts loose into recklessness.

Let Her Go By Sissy And The Blisters Blisters At 7.8 On The Liquid Hip Richter Scale. 

Separate out the songs and the score would have been dramatically different. Likewise, off some future live album with Sissy and The Blisters jumping up Got No Home and Sleeping Around At Night, they'll sound even better too. Otherwise, there are three, maybe four songs that propel these guys forward because they take the least safest road. We need more of it.

All together, Sissy and The Blisters have eight tracks out on the market. You can find You Girl, Let Her Go, and Mystics on the new EP, Let Her Go, on iTunes. Also on iTunes, you can find the single or, even better, The Wolf off the In The City Unsigned Collection. The Let Her Go EP is also on Amazon.

Gospel Music Duettes As Owen Holmes Hears It

Owen Holmes is best known as the bassist for the American indie pop band Black Kids. Hailing from Jacksonville, Florida, Black Kids broke out a few years ago with some overtly indie twee-pop party tunes that won over Vice magazine, Pitchfork magazine, and CMJ (but not us).

There is more to hear from Holmes than the fizzy stylings of his band mates. After coming back from the Big Day Out festivals in New Zealand and Australia, Holmes seems to have had some extra time on his hands.

So he dusted off some duets and used them, along with some delirium caused by "two-hour, many-mile runs around Jacksonville" to produce a collection strong enough for an EP. According to Holmes, the songs were written in his apartment while brewing beer in the kitchen and then he recorded the album at home.

"When I say 'recorded,' I mean that I stuck a microphone in front of whatever I was playing," wrote Holmes on a guest post for the Kill Rock Stars label. "I played everything except for the drum set."

Duettes is vibrant collection of roughly produced alternative wanderings with anybodys but not nobodys.

To give you an idea just how accidentally the album came together, Holmes says he didn't even know the singers who accompanied him, with the exception of SoKo. He searched the net and then emailed people to see if they would sing with him.

He came up with SoKo (as mentioned), Shirley Simms (The Magnetic Fields), Tracyanne Campbell (Camera Obscura), Darren Haymen (who recently produced Essex Arms), and Cassie Ramone (Vivian Girls). The effort is titled with the semi-fictitious and impossible-to-find-via-search band moniker Gospel Music.

The effort pays out in dividends. A few years back, these would have been the kind of indie duets that fans would hunt for inside obscure record shops and bootleg sections. Nowadays, digital distribution makes them more accessible. However, as it stands right now, it's hard to tell how many people know they exist.

The five songs are pretty much spelled out by Holmes in his write up. They are all straightforward cuts, random social situations woven together with things he likes, like his car, beer, and boiled peanuts. Somehow, it works.

The best of the bunch is I Miss The Shit Out Of You with SoKo. Automobile with Tracyanne Campbell was the first to see some lift thanks to a campy and underplayed YouTube video directed by Alan Del Rio Ortiz. It was shot as part of a 13-hour road trip. Ortiz has an old school vintage vision. Although he only had three vids under he belt, he's clearly a director to watch.


It's hard to say that Holmes is the best singer ever (he's likable in a Kimya Dawson kind of way), but no one can deny that he is an extraordinary composer, capable of writing some one-off music and bringing the right people together to make it happen. All five of the tracks are worth owning.

The U.K.'s Fierce Panda originally released the album as homespun, homegrown, homemade indie music. They described it as "hobo-jumping leftfield nuggets" with alternative music guest stars." And you know, they are kind of right too. Kill Rock Stars gets props for the U.S. drop.

Gospel Music's Duettes Climbs To 8.5 On The Liquid Hip Richter Scale.

All in all, Gospel Music is the kind of stuff we look for every day. Some days we find it. Today was one of those days. Even Charles Newman (Stephin Merritt's man) deserves a hat tip. He mixed the album.

You can find Duettes by Gospel Music on iTunes. You can also find it under duettes - EP on Amazon.