The Bandana Splits (retro pop)

It seems to be an automatic attribution nowadays to describe any use of a historically located pop-cultural style as ‘ironic’. I caught myself on the verge of unreflectingly starting off about The Bandana Splits’ ‘ironic appropriation of 1950s pop tropes’ or some such bollocks, and then I thought, actually what’s so ironic about it? I think they just like it. I don’t get the impression they’re historical re-enactment geeks, with their houses all done up 50s style, but they clearly enjoy the sounds and sights of that era…

Various Artists – Singles & EPs

It takes a musical education to do what Matt Winkworth does, and it takes some skills to keep up with him as The Winkworthers Originals do (their grandfathers’ delicious butter candy notwithstanding). It’s a jazz-operatic, literary, nonsensical, funny, serious, harmonically sophisticated, melodramatic oom-pah sort of a thing, delivered with lashings of vaudevillian relish. As you may have inferred from the cover art and the use of ‘brillig’ in the title, one of the songs is a setting of a certain Mr. Dodgson’s famous poem ‘Jabberwocky’…