This week, ANBAD is picking our favourite new bands that are appearing at Salford’s forthcoming Sounds From The Other City festival, and today, it’s the turn of Tigercats…

Tigercats are a rarity in a way that’s hard to properly pin down. Warning: vague stabs at corroboration follow.

Maybe it’s that their photographs show a band that look like they’re just out to have fun as opposed to pouting moodily with one eye one a hair product advertising contract.

Maybe it’s that their candour is refreshing. Maybe it’s that they swaddle their songs in fun, love, and youthful loopiness.

Or maybe it’s that, in a musical world where faux-nostaligia provides the backbone, guts and brains of most bands’ sound, this one sounds like they’re somehow more honest in their application of influence from days gone by.

I don’t think that Tigercats are trying to ape the sound of Pavement, or a host of C86 bands – it has just turned out that way. And that’s just hunky-dory.

Thus, Easter Island couldn’t be jauntier if it tried – but it’s no tired glockenspiel quaintcore nostalgia-fest, jittering and flailing under its own kinetic lunacy, and the genuinely excellent 1985 is steely and brittle beneath its raggedy velveteen exterior.

Their songs betray no alterior motives of forced cool, and are interested only in establishing their public image as an enthusiastic young band in love with making songs. Excellent, alive, and bright.

MORE: myspace.com/tigercatswearinghats