Some things in life just make our day.

A puppy dog’s smile, solid chocolate Kit Kats, not having to get a round in at the pub, bacon sandwiches for lunch, not having to do any work, realising it’s quitting time after thinking it was only two o’clock, Firefox not crashing and finally, getting sent free stuff. Go on PR companies, you know you love us.

Whenever bucketloads of music comes hurtling towards us, the majority of it can be summed up in a few words. ‘Radiohead wannabes’ and ‘bum toss’ are terms most frequently used. But when bands like The Lovely Sparrows come along, we can’t just simply say ‘they make lovely sounding songs’. Partly because the word lovely is a bit vague, and even we’re not that lazy to recycle the band’s own name in to a review.

Birds as a general rule can’t play any instruments. So we apologise in advance if you thought this trawl was going to present a band made up of birds performing happy hardcore. The only musical bird we know of is Big Bird off the TV. But then, someone told us he wasn’t real when we were writing this. So now we have to put up with the annoying wood pigeons that squeal like ruddy pigs before any daylight breaks through the table cloth we use as curtains. We’re poor, you see.

Having the word ‘lovely’ in your band name seems to be a winning combination for us. Last year we looked at The Lovely Eggs who were quite wonderful in their own unique and quirky way. The Lovely Sparrows are keeping up this biannual tradition by making music that won’t have Radio 1 DJs ejaculating all over it, but should still have people getting moist in excitement.

Armed with a guitar and the humble voice, The Lovely Sparrows trudges through a selection of releases from over the years. Year Of The Dog is the stand out track for us with its sad undertones and glistening echoes of hope. Interestingly, we read that this is the only song that survived a recording session after a laptop was stolen featuring all of the demo’s for a new release. Please note, we didn’t steal that from Wikipedia, so it’s quite likely to be true.

Admittedly, this week’s band was discovered after listening to someone else on YouTube and then seeing this video pop up as a recommended choice. We always thought robots and machines were evil devices, simply designed to enslave the human race, well that’s before they run out battery power. However, if more utterly ace bands like this can be found, we may consider renaming this feature to ‘YouTube Recommendation Trawl’.

But probably not, we’ll need to wait for MySpace to implode first.

For more:

Lovely Sparrows MySpace

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