Albums

Pete and the Pirates - Wait Stop Begin (mini-album)

Thomas 22/07/2006

Rating: 4/5

It's indie Jim but rarely as we know it. Songs that could have been recorded (in a shed) any time over the last twenty years, not all brilliant yet still able to creep into the brain after three listens, pitched from plaintive to pissed-off and pulling off that joyous trick of being a bucket of influences whilst retaining a sound of their own.

A major contributor is the budget recording which gives the music real character, a trebly, nostalgic racket that sounds, improbably, like Clearlake fighting no-fi punksters the Thermals over a sad-eyed girl in Liverpool, 1963. And going home to mope after losing, mopping a cut with one hand and tapping away at a typewriter with the other.

Fact: Shit records do not get the imagination going quite like this.