Occasionally unforeseen events pricks your inflated sense of self-worth, and today’s covert prickle arrived in the form of John Peel’s LP archive being released onto an unsuspecting internet.
Anyone with even the vaguest interest in new music will get lost for hours in Peel’s virtual shelving units, and doing so serves as a reminder of the great man’s obsessive dedication to discovering, hoarding and sharing new music in a pre-music blog, pre-Pitchfork, pre-Hype Machine era.
For a long time, John Peel was new music discovery. Now we are all at it, with varying degrees of success – but he was the first, and almost inarguably the best, and an inspiration to anyone who loves music.
Even now, my brass-tacks question when choosing a band to put on ANBAD is “but would John Peel have played them?” Of course, I can only guess if he would’ve played Hillary and the Democrats‘ EP of songs about Sweden, but Let’s Play Kubb! is so outrageously pleasure-inducing, I can think of no reason to assume he wouldn’t.
Let’s leave the clichés about Liverpudlian bands being as equally choice purveyors of jangle-pop tunes as the Swedish to one side for the moment, and simply enjoy a band who are – and I mean this in the most wholly encouraging terms – a throwback.
Hillary and the Democrats aren’t a bunch of poseurs – they’re playing good music for the right reasons: to have fun, to share pleasure and with an ethic that prioritises making the best music possible. What more would anyone want? Excellent.
MIDWEEK MIXTAPE // 2nd May 2012 | A New Band A Day!