Garageland
Come Back Special / Pop Cigar
Flying Nun

Garageland are a four piece band - guitars, bass and drums - who are not afraid to use jangly guitar as well as distortion. The lyrics are simple, but still clever and catchy, and delivered in a very relaxed easy manner.

Come Back Special contains five songs, all of them gems. The EP opens with a nice little 50's style TV music show intro, and then we kick into Come Back. A nice upbeat song which contains the great line, "Come back, all is forgiven, you don't know what you're missing" and cool drumming and guitar, not unlike the Wedding Present. Next up is Struck which is a lot slower, and musically reminiscent of early Cure, with simple, dreamy melodies played on bass and guitar. Another great lyric can found near the end, "Billy Joel is an a******" well the second syllable rhymes with Joel anyway. What Will You Do? is more medium-paced, and again has simple groovy melodies, that you will find yourself nodding your head to.

Then it's on to the rocking Fay Ray, which will grab you and take you on a great 3-minute ride. Lots of great changes and vocal hooks in this one. Finally we close with Pop Cigar which got huge amounts of play on student radio here. This little number has a cool discordent riff, and nicely distorted vocals. And that's it. If you're anything like me you'll wonder where that 17 minutes and 34 seconds went, and you'll have to put the disc on again.

I whole-heartedly recommend this disc, the five songs are so good they would carry another weak 5 ones to a make reasonable album. Instead Garageland decided to make it a flawless EP/single. As such, it should be offered at a reasonable price, so it's definitely worth a go. Quite frankly, you gotta get some!

Copyright © 1997 Ants