The Cords
★★★★★
The Cords
SKEPWAX/SLUMBERLAND. CD/DL/LP
Flex appeal: teenage Scottish indie-poppers show their class.
“Sad” rhymes with “bad”, “stay” rhymes with “away”; now form a band. The rules of cutie-pop are as old as the first Pastels single, and happily continue to apply to new generations, with teenaged Inverkip sisters Eve and Grace Tedeschi causing quite the stir in C86-literate circles. With a White Stripes-style guitar and drums set-up, their debut has an abundance of Shop Assistants-style ba-ba-ba-ba-bangers (Doubt It’s Gonna Change; Vera; lead single Fabulist) as well as a song about giving the reluctant family dog a trim, Bo’s New Haircut. However, there is more to The Cords than slightly melancholy, primary-coloured fun; the addition of a distortion pedal ups the harmonic ante on Yes It’s True, while Weird Feeling is an agoraphobic’s lament on a par with Strawberry Switchblade’s Trees And Flowers. The new sound of young Scotland.