Gum / Keel Her / Joanna Gruesome / Playlounge - Family Portrait (7" vinyl)

It’s four way split time. Always a good way to get on top of what’s going on new-bands-wise I think. This one on Art Is Hard opens with Gum doing their very best My Bloody Valentine impression with some cute little noise-guitar bursts and bendy chords just like Dublin’s finest. First time through I played it all the way through at 45rpm and it sounded fine and I thought there was a girl singing but actually it goes on 33 and the singer is a boy.

Then we’ve got Keel Her, the solo project of Rose Keeler-Schaffeler, dropping the excellently-titled ‘Norman’. It’s a tasty little bit of slacker pop with a bouncy drum groove and a nice obnoxious little lead guitar line. It’s clanky and lo-fi and kind of nostalgic-sounding. Reminds me of the ‘90s, back when you found out about bands from photocopied zines and still thought CDs were worth money.

Flip it on its flip and there’s a long one from the amusingly-monikered Joanna Gruesome, who also bring us back to the ‘90s with some jangly fuzzpop on what is probably the most hi-fi recording on this collection. The boy-girl vocals are buried really deep in the mix which I like, and there’s a nice Dinosaur Jr-esque crunch to the chunky jangle-fuzz-jangle guitar tones. This one’s my favourite of these four cuts.

Then Playlounge’s cheekily-titled ‘Conor, Oh Burst?’ rounds things off in a pretty similar fuzzpop style to the JG track but in less than half the time. Solid contributions all round.