A couple of issues ago I reviewed the 7" by Bobsy on Moonscreen; this was one of the best old-style indiepop records I'd heard for years! I also had the first Moonscreen 7", Majestic 12's Long, which has two melodic tracks which mix jangly pop with an more atmospheric feel. The song You Are The One hints at dreampop, whilst not being as noisy as you'd expect from this genre.

Interested to hear more from this label, I got in touch with them and got hold of the three other 7"s they'd released. The 2nd release was 3am by Matt Love, who Sarah fans will recognise as being from Even As We Speak. Even As We Speak came up with some pretty diverse stuff, particularly on their album Feral Pop Frenzy, and this 7" is different again. Another Beer is vaguely country tinged, My Old Shotgun is quirky pop, and Ambition is even quirkier pop with a bassline which is like an odder version of one you might hear in a jazz piece. A surprising collection of songs which has more in common with quirk-pop outfits such as Eggs than it has with Even As We Speak.

When I've complained about lo-fi music in the past I've meant lo-fi in its extremest form - where the hiss drowns out the songs and the tape quality is so bad that the sound drops out all the time, and it's not even as if the tunes are so good that you can forgive the band for sounding like they're not putting enough effort into the recording... The Utensils, with their Skittle Breath 7", are on the right side of lo-fi - whilst there is tape hiss on here the tunes are strong enough to shine through. This sort of bedroom pop with fuzzy guitars and cheap-sounding keyboard/drum machine has to be lo-fi; if it was recorded in a proper studio it would no doubt lose its charm. This is a split release with the Drive-in label (as was the Bobsy single) and features two shortish songs and five very short ones. Its front cover shows a childlike drawing of a teddy bear playing a small keyboard, and this is pretty appropriate.

Glaring Surge's Unreleased Dreams is a blast from the past! I remember this, and the b-side Colour My Days, from a tape which came out in the days when it was the first time round for the shoegazing scene, and when there was still a widespread janglepop community. These styles died out but there's now been a resurgence of both dreampop and janglepop - not so much in Britain but in America and mainland Europe there's been loads of small indie labels springing up which specialise in old-school indiepop of various types. This 7" has one track of shoegazer type stuff and another noisepop-with-jangly-bits song, and whilst it would have sounded anachronistic if released in, say, 1997 or something, it fits in a lot more in today's true indie scene. Great to see that these tracks have now been released properly, ie not on a demo tape, as the songs deserve to be heard by more people than the limited audience demos have.

The bad news is that the Glaring Surge 7" is going to be the last ever Moonscreen release... BUT - Eric will be starting a new label, Little Prints, running alongside his mailorder service of the same name, which stocks indiepop and post-rock records from America, England and Australia. Look out for a 7" by Postal Blue - now this I'm looking forward to, the one track of theirs that I've heard is probably the most Sarah-esque song that isn't on Sarah. Info from Eric Fritzler, c/o Little Prints Records, PO Box 888153, Grand Rapids, MI 49588, USA.

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