Holograms, “Holograms” (Captured Tracks, 2012)
This is straight-up hard-driving, angular post-punk. Think Joy Division + Gang of Four + Ruts. What makes these Swedes stand out from the similar crowd is a superior melodic sense and some genuine muscle.
Try 3, 6
8/23/12
Hollows, “Vulture” (Trouble In Mind, 2012)
Mostly-female garage-punk band with a light, psych-folk-inflected approach, and even hints of surf music. This has a nicely sparse, haunted and subtly luminous feel, somewhat reminiscent of some K stuff, and the songs are excellent.
Try 3, 4, 6
4/30/12
Hoku, “Another Dumb Blonde” (Geffen, 2000)
A lost classic from the golden age of 21st-century teenpop. Hoku was the daughter of Hawaiian-exotica crooner Don Ho, and this music – written by Antonio Armato and Tim James, who went on to fuel Disney’s teen-idol domination later in the decade – is its own kind of beach-pop utopia. Cotton-candy-fuzzed bubblegum-alternative guitars ride waves of rolling Britney-beats and synth-whooshes, with Hoku’s winsomely snarky vocals the perfect voice for a total-art-work that was to the early ‘00s what the Beach Boys were to the early ‘60s. The sound of kids reveling in a seemingly endless summer, just before the hammer of history came down hard.
Try 1, 3, 7
11/10/16
Hinds, “Leave Me Alone” (Mom & Pop, 2016)
Poppy garage punk from Spain, discordantly jangly but winsomely singsongish too. Nice to hear that chasing the dawn through the beer-soaked confusion of one’s early-to-mid-twenties sounds the same in Europe as here, and this quartet captures it well.
Try 4, 9. 12
Hemyl, “Spend a Little Time” 12” (Merak, 1983 [?])
Fine Italo-disco, with a nice chirpy-synth-pop aspect also.
Try 1/1.
11/12/12
Heavy Times, “Dead” (Rotted Tooth, 2010)Exceptionally superb garage-punk – loose, hard-driving and spirited, with classic-sounding tunes and an archetypcal drunk-on-cheap-beer-in-the-middle-of-nowhere feel.
All Excellent. Start with A/1, A/2
1/29/12
Heavenly, “The Decline And Fall Of . . “ (K, 1994)
Twee-pop colossus Amelia Fletcher made her name with Talulah Gosh in the ‘80s and still makes great music today with Tender Trap, but Heavenly was perhaps her most fully realized project, and this is my favorite of their albums – the jangly melodies still awkwardly sweet, but with real punk-rock fire behind them.
Try 7, 8
1/23/14
Heavenly, “Le Jardin de Heavenly” (K, 1992)
Amelia Fletcher helped create twee-pop with Talulah Gosh back in the mid-‘80s/C86 era, and she’s kept making great records in the style up to the present day. This one finds her in transition – the melodic palette is expanding from her early work; the elegantly stinging attack of Heavenly’s next records isn’t there yet, but I find the more winsome, languid sound here to have charms of its own.
Try 1, 4
7/19/12
Heavenly Beat, “Talent” (Captured Tracks, 2012)
Very austere synth-pop, with a vocalist who sounds like he’s about to slit his wrists in his pink marble bathtub. Fun stuff in my book, and with a pleasantly steady low-key groove.
Try 4, 6
8/23/12
Heaven And Earth, “Refuge” (Lion Productions, 2011; original release 1973)
Dual female harmony vocalists (one a fine guitarist as well) join together for a nearly forgotten but magnificent acid-folk LP, just reissued. It’s got a strong American folk-pop vibe, à la Simon and Garfunkel, but the vocals are exceptionally powerful – warm but forceful, like steam on a winter night, and edged with a keening hint of peculiarity.
Try A/1, A/4, B/2
1/6/12