There’s all the richness you need right here, you see; Sey Hollo is very much aligned with the Mogwai school of post-rock, lots of moody layered textures and drones (guitars, bass, organs, pianos), simple melodies piled up over sparse stately drumming and punctuated with the occasional historical vocal sample. Seven tunes, fifty minutes; a thick and dirge-like soundtrack that doubtless fits well in a country where it’s more than possible to not see the sun for months at a time… and in Sweden, too. (Arf, arf! I shouldn’t complain, really; we had more of a summer this year than the last three put together.)

Those samples (in keeping with song titles like “Dependistas”, “Eighty Five Percent”, “The Sleepy Taxpayer” and “A Toxic Toast To Broken Promises”) signal what seems to be a non-partisan political edge to the Sey Hollo project – one that focusses on those recent events in the exciting and inexplicable world of high finance which have brought us to a rather uncertain place in the economic landscape. There’s a grim look to the near-future, at least for those of us who don’t work in the change-proof glass’n'chrome bastions of the Square Mile and Wall Street, and the dolorous density of Sey Hollo is well suited to such troubled times… but there’s always hope, shining like a hint of sun over a fog-shrouded horizon, and Sey Hollo‘s tunes harbour that hope in the form of bright but plaintive chord progressions and the occasional soaring echo-soaked lead line piercing through the fog.

It’s not a beauty that everyone appreciates (I’ve lost count of the number of people who, on being played a Mogwai album, say “well, it’s nice, but it’s a bit miserable, isn’t it?”), but if you still manage to find a moment every now and again where you can look through a crack in the clouds and dream of flying away from the rain-slick city around you… well, let’s just say Sey Hollo has supplied another chunk of soundtrack for Icarus impersonators everywhere. Gorgeous stuff.

Sadly, there’s not a great deal more than that, and the addition of vocal parts does them few favours; I think I’d have enjoyed The Magic Table Dance more as a pure instrumental selection. The high-register soft-rock vocals in “Uniform” and “How It Feels” feel very out of place, while the singing on “Impressions” and shameless Welcome to Sky Valley highlights-homage “Demons” (come on, guys, at least file the whole engine number off, eh?) is unremarkably competent in a biker-bar covers-band kind of way, but the heavy-lidded drawl of “Come Over” is a bit closer to the mark, even if it is a blatant John Garcia clone-job. To be blunt, the vocals add nothing of value, and at worst they distract from the rich riffs and precision percussion that support them.

As has been discussed before on this here site, though, bands in retro subgenres like stoner can’t really be fairly assessed on originality, because that’s not what they’re chasing after. Instead, you’ve got to listen for a fresh inflection in the interpretation, something that puts a new spin on the old tropes… and here Been Obscene have something in their favour, namely an almost proggy tendency to wig out and play more complex punkish riffs with the guitars following close behind the drums, which makes the shortness of mid-album cut “Freakin’ Rabbit” and later tune “Ring Ring” a disappointment. But this tendency is far from overused, and the bulk of the album retreads the sound of a circus that left town long ago. The Magic Table Dance is not a bad album, by any means, and a fine advert for what I’m guessing is a great live show… but it’s no must-hear masterpiece.

The Sharktopus EP is a bit too shrieky-growly-roaring-hairpin-turn-dakkadakkadakka-mellow-introspection-OMGWTF-wooooaaargh for my usual tastes (despite the smooth and melodic stadium-prog/post-rock passages that balance out the jagged double-kick’n'gravel-throat mayhem) but even a lightweight like me can only listen in awe to the razor-sharp prison shiv of technique that Dead At The Scene are wielding, doubtless whittled away in a windowless room over the course of many meditative months with revenge in mind. My advice to Edinburgh metalheads, be they musos or just fans: don’t turn your back on Dead At The Scene, or the last thing you’ll feel is a tentacle slipping round your neck before the teeth tear into your flesh…

Indeed, it’s like a lost industrial gem-in-the-rough from a decade or so ago, and that pushes a whole bunch of my buttons at once. Better still, there’s a lot of variety in each track – a good thing to know when confronted by a fifty-minute album with fifteen tracks, even if a few of them are interludes and bridges between more complete pieces. If there’s a downside to this, it’s that Return To Earth don’t have a distinctive sound all their own, but the collage effect that results – like a bunch of tropes sliced and gouged out of the last quarter-century of heavy music and sewn together with the care of a mechanoid master seamstress with an axe to grind – is curiously refreshing. You’re never quite sure what’s coming next, and incongruity is an ally: the little burst of Boston-esque vocal melody in the latter half of “Back Of My Hand” betrays a band who aren’t interested only in corroded edges and brutal mass, and the pop hooks of “Night Of The Exploding Razors” balance beautifully with the overdriven rage-vocals and monolithic bludgeoning of the simple four-bar chord sequence.

In keeping with the industrial tradition, much of Automata is a raging against the dying of the light of civilisation, echoing both Trent Reznor’s narratives of personal decay and Al Jorgenson’s darkly narcotised despair at a world scarred by the machinations of neo-liberalism and the military economic complex. But thanks to brief appearances by moody strings and echoing piano (as well as the afore-mentioned melodic nous), there’s a burlesque vibe to things: not necessarily tattoo’d chicks dancing in frilly knickers and pasties (though that’s fine, too), but the “everything’s ending, so let’s party in the ruins while we still can” attitude that permeated interwar Berlin and gave birth to the decadent glamour that alternative culture has been flirting with of late. Whether events will prove this cyclic revival of the attitudes of a doomed passage from our past to be prophetic remains to be seen… though the current right-wing media uproar over the “Ground Zero mosque” Cordoba Centre in New York is an ominous echo of Weimar Germany’s paranoia and intolerance toward The Other, and pretty much buries the last remaining optimism and hope for change that rode in on Obama’s coat-tails.

But if it’s America’s destiny to fall into internecine social collapse and political schism, at least Return To Earth have got the soundtrack sorted. Turn it up loud; dance while the world burns.

But you know what? Somehow, it works. Tweak Bird are a duo, one on drums and one on baritone guitar, and unlike a lot of American Apparel-wearing bands who claim to make “heavy pop music”, these guys really seem to be doing exactly that. It’s dumb and lumpen stuff, sure, but despite the prevailing fashion for deliberate ineptitude as an artistic statement, dumb music can be good fun when it’s done earnestly. Think of early Kyuss, for instance, which was about as heavy as anything else at the time, not to mention brazenly, shamelessly, shit-eating-grinningly dumb… but they pulled it off because they loved the thing they were sending up more than their sending up of it (if that makes any sense). What connects Tweak Bird and Kyuss is that very attitude, I think; rather than skulking about behind basic music skills masquerading as ironic cultural detachment, Tweak Bird are plainly just having a whole shit-load of fun writing daft loud Neanderthal guitar riffs and endearingly naïve and optimistic vocals. Inviting your mate in to doodle around on a saxophone for three minutes at a time (“A Sun / Ahh Ahh”, “Distant Airways”) is probably an added bonus.

I’m not going to make any grandiose claims here; fun as Tweak Bird is to listen to, I can’t really see its Pixies-meets-stoner-riffola-on-a-sugar-high stylings becoming a regular fixture on my playlist (though I wouldn’t want to rule it out, either). But what’s pretty plain to hear is that they’re making music for the love of the music itself… if you can listen to the wide-eyed “Sky Ride” and not smile, not even a little bit, then you’re a more cynical hard-hearted bastard than even I am (and that’s saying something). Noisy dumb pop done with passion has been a bit thin on the ground of late, and I’m hoping Tweak Bird might be the sharp end of a wedge of change. Fingers crossed, eh?