Tracks - page 37

The band that inspired a thousand twee others, still going 30 years on.

Impossible not to love, impossible not to join in, bounce, dance, yell yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah at the right moments, clappable, hummable, brilliant.

If there was an indie-pop World Cup, I’d be putting my money on Scotland, and I’d be calling for the captain’s armband to be wrapped round the sensitive, sweetly soulful arms of Butcher Boy

Three minutes of Swedish win.

Twee genius, made improbably well-known thanks to its use in Budweiser adverts in the US since 2010.

Something more modern in the jangly style. The album Days was a 2011 end of year poll regular, even managing the neat trick of appealing to both Pitchfork and Uncut.

Let’s get this indie-pop ball rolling with an early creation classic, seen here in all the audio and visual clarity and fidelity we’ve come to expect from old VHS cassettes.

A track about being stuck in the 90s that manages to make you feel harmlessly nostalgic for that time, while at the same time making you hate yourself for it.

Nigel Godrich sprinkled his magic dust all over The Man Who, and helped turn a band that had briefly flirted with the top 10 (1997’s Good Feeling was well enough received, and hit number nine,...

One of the best sounding albums of the 90s, expanding on the sound of The Bends, and taking Radiohead into galaxies new, leaving Pablo Honey all but a distant memory; an album by another band...

This is roughly the point at which Aus/NZ group Crowded House started to move into “hey, even if you can’t necessarily immediately recall all their hits, there’s a chance that you’ve hummed a few of...

Falling perfectly into that sweet spot between experimentation and plain straight up song-writing panache, The Soft Bulletin was a creative and critical peak for The Flaming Lips, their work both before and since veering too...

In the late 1990s, at the tail-end of the britpop days, when interest was rapidly waning, a young Sophie fronted Theaudience, a gentle indie-pop group who managed one album and a handful of singles before...

It’s Tim Wheeler’s favourite Ash song, lyrically and musically, and who am I to disagree? Goldfinger is classic quiet/LOUD, driven by some furious pounding and heavy chords.

The second track from the forthcoming second album by Sweden’s I Break Horses continues the progress from their debut album Hearts that was apparent on Denial, with the hazy shoegazing once more playing second fiddle...

Recorded initially during their 1995 tour, as members of the band were falling apart in very real and physical ways (only Peter Buck made it through unscathed), New Adventures in Hi-Fi marked a pretty extraordinary...

I won’t lie to you. I feel cheated by Counting Crows. After literally minutes of half-drunk wavering over whether to leave the pub and pop to HMV to buy a copy of their highly rated...

For a moment in 1992 the indie press were all agog with the wonders of a country group. Signed to Heavenly, and labelmates to the likes of St Etienne and Flowered Up (the three acts...

I first became aware of Elliott Smith when he played the Shepherd's Bush Empire in 1998. Supporting up-and-coming cardigan wearers Belle & Sebastian he was almost inaudible, invisible. I really had no idea at the...

I love it when Britpop does moody. It’s like hearing a nun swear.