Orca Team is Seattle’s answer to twee-ish post-punk beach pop, and they prove it with their new HHBTM Records 7-inch single. Title track “Take My Hand” is packed with a 60s-pop bass, a jangly guitar, reverb-soaked vocals, and hefty stomping drums with plenty of cymbal rides.

Oh Fishboy, you never fail to amuse. We interviewed Fishboy’s Eric Michener a few months back about his new LP, Classic Creeps, which finally came out this week. Yeah, we’ve been rocking to it since January and can contest to its total awesomeness. Well, in celebration of the release, Michener, aka Fishboy, put together a video for the album’s fifth song, “Alyson Revere”, and it goes a little something like this…

The HHBTM team has sent me two lovely little packages in the past few months, the second of which arrived just last week. I figured it was high time to give them coverage… in list form! HHBTM, if you’re not familiar with the label, is short from Happy Happy Birthday To Me Records, and they’ve released several favorites over the years; bands like Patience Please, Fishboy, The Superions, Bunnygrunt, Casper And The Cookies, Velcro Stars and Eux Autres. Their singles club even includes the likes of Apples …

Let’s not sugar coat the story here. The Superions‘ single and respected video, “Who Threw That Ham At Me” is nothing more than a strange story about getting caught shoplifiting meat products and all while enjoying a nice disco and inventing a new dance to twirl about and “flip your lid”. Seems kind of strange, right? But, once you realize that the ring leader of this estranged disco circus is none other than Fred Schneider, it might make more sense. This is indeed the man who …

Gingerbread Dog is the debut release on HHBTM for this Florida trio. Baby Calendar has released before, but it was all DIY. And while I have yet to crack the past album, Fifteen Year Old Sneakers, I must say that what I’ve heard on Gingerbread Dog is on the verge of brilliance.
To quote their biography, Baby Calendar is “not completely pop or twee, not completely punk or rock.” Instead, they contain all four elements.
At the most elementary level, Baby Calendar is a cute trio that creates a classic male/female …

In the grunge music of the 90s we saw the mass standardization of the head-bang. For you young ones, that’s when you take your nasty, long, greasy, unwashed hair and whip it from back to front and front to back in rapid motions. The result, obviously, is brain damage. That’s what rock-n-roll will do for ya. Pop, on the other hand, takes that motion and reduces it to a quick nod. The good news is that you have more brain cells to kill with vices …

Hotpants Romance are so perfectly strange they’re almost hard to comprehend. They boast their work as “three girls, three years, three chords”. They really are as simple as that on the surface. Yet, there are so many things from their album It’s A Heatwave that are shiny, bright, and utterly complicated in the most splendid of ways. Laura, Lowri, and Kate seem to enjoy the frame of mind and sound they have developed by the large amount of energy they exude through each track.

This may come as a surprise: Ohio is a hot spot for up-and-coming indie pop artists. There’s Pomegranates out of Cincinnati and Bears in Cleveland. Rounding out the power trio is Cleveland’s Afternoon Naps. Catchy melodies and memorable vocal hooks can be found throughout their sophomore release, Parades. But there’s much more behind the music of Afternoon Naps that makes them one of the most promising pop bands around.

Written by Fense
My FensePost inbox is out of control. Recently, it topped 500 messages, most of which I had yet to read. Thanks to a bit more free time of late, I am finally beginning to tackle this mass o’ crap and get some shit done. One item that surprisingly slipped through the cracks was the video for “Anne Boleyn” by French-pop Portlanders Eux Autres (MySpace).