>Sometimes a band’s influences are obvious – not necessarily in terms of sounding like other artists, but the ideas their brains keep returning to as a starting point when making music. Paul McCartney’s songs always hark back to a music-hall rumbustiousness, The Clash’s angry buzz, in keeping with punk’s Year Zero ethic, is brimming with 50’s rock ‘n’ roll tricks, and Johnny Borrell clearly grew up in a locked windowless room with only Boomhouse Rats LPs for company.

Other bands influences are not so clear. Today’s New Band, Doctor My Eyes, are an unusual example of successfully combining studio electronics and the live band in a coherent, joyful jumble.

Lungs is evidence of a thorough nerd-like knowledge of electronic music and all its build-and-release foibles. A simple robo-riff provides the foundation for what turns into a tinny, crystalline pop record that, if played loud enough, could get the most reticent of dancefloors shuffling.

The same sense of a song’s structure and progression are splattered throughout With An Alien Smile, but here the rough and ready electronics are dropped, instead deploying the standard four-square instruments in an equally minimal fashion.

Even in songs where the bleeping and blooping is absent, the feeling is that they are a band whose template is not from the usual off-the-peg rock mindset. Their songs are electronic in spirit, if not always in sound.

Doctor My Eyes are definitely worth a listen, and certainly worth keeping your eye on, you know, just in case. Listen, here, now!