The Chairs have long dwelled restlessly as a prime example of the sort of underground band which deserved to make it, but were for one reason or another never given the chance by the music establishment to break into the wider consciousness of the dirty business that is rock ‘n’ roll. “Fly the Flag” is vocalist Simon Harmer & Co.’s attempt at rectifying this situation. The Norwegian group, based out of the small coastal town of Stavanger, have managed to put together a record laden with material showcasing their ability to tie together all the loose ends of their past years as something of an eclectic indie underground outfit and really clock in some solid, streamlined melodic rock songs. Shifting between well-fashioned, at times hard-hitting rock ‘n’ roll tracks with delightfully inspired melodies to more contemplative, melancholic material, the group show themselves capable of drawing on as diverse influences as a slowed down Ramones to Little Richard (although I suspect Harmer is laying it on a little thick when citing these as his prime influences for the record) to panicky, “Pablo Honey”-era Radiohead.

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Phoenix - French popsters on the razor edge of making an enjoyable, catch-all record, but failing in the efforts of studio production to steer the group’s creative energy towards radio appeal. “Alphabetical” is too smooth, rhythms and handclaps too digitalised, and the velvet soft jazz-pop vocals a dime a dozen. The lyrics are disturbing - maybe it’s because they’re French and don’t grasp a command of the English language to the same extent as a native speaker might be expected to, but I suspect the problem lies in a deeper, darker, less forgivable place. Frighteningly, even the radio material loses direction after the second track - the rest of the songs, almost without exception, are just plain bland or with some grain of potential, but damned to oblivion because of the maximalistic studio efforts to make every single track equal in beat and feel (for example, “Victim of the Crime” opens promisingy with a sort of Commodore 64 synth ditty only to suffer the death of ‘hit appeal’, then comes through on a 30 second wave of acceptably frantic drumming - but alas, too little, too late!).

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This cleverly named band’s self-titled EP has “Franz Ferdinand” written all over it, but cleaner, more to the bone of the matter and more American in its pop aspirations. Similar driving rhythms and repeating riffs in different keys - very unhappy, very walkable, very doom pop. A bit of fellow Texans “And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead” (and other vexingly long-named influences) in there as well.

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Eyvind Kang’s “The Story of Iceland” plays just like one might expect something as eclectic as an avant-garde musical rendition of an island nation’s mythological past would. It builds up slowly, broodingly over a series of instrumental, long-winded tracks and draws on Kang’s abilities with the perhaps unusually paired violin and tuba (playing the latter because he arrived late for his first music lessons at school as a youth, and all the other instruments were already taken). With first-hand experience from the country - his mother came from Iceland, Kang lived there when he was younger, and Icelandic was his first language - he translates the loneliness of the place as one might imagine it without ever even having seen the country and packaging it all neatly into a very minimalistic record, without any extra aural “fluff”.

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Gary Numan has been in the music business for well over 25 years, and is considered something of a Godfather of Electropop among music critics and listeners alike. It’s easy to see why from a brief glance at his early discography. With a handful of successful records in the late 70s and early 80s, Numan clearly defined “the shape of things to come” for the new wave movement with his musically detached coldness and introspectively written lyrics.

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While “The Grudge” is no radical departure from the layered industrial, dark ambient sound Mortiis has been steadily working on from the very beginning of his solo career, there is a marked, if somewhat intangible, shift away from his previous release, “Smell of Rain”. The beats hit harder and more furiously on more of the tracks, the guitars are more distorted, the vocals remain majestic and near-spoken at times, but can also be full of icy, metal-fuelled rage.

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Midnight Monkeys may only have a couple of tracks under their belt, but after listening to “Daddy’s Gun” and “Bring it On” from their debut single, I’m convinced that their elektromensch blend of rock and synthesisers is on its way to becoming at least a semi-permanent fixture on the Swedish sound landscape. While I’m not overjoyed by the Tiny and Autohorse remixes on “Daddy’s Gun”, the original tracks are good enough to warrant a listen by even the fiercest of eurosceptics.

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Alright, anyone whose been paying even the slightest bit of attention to popular music in the last couple of years will by now be familiar with the phenomena that has come to be known as The Hives. Fronted by charismatic Howlin’ Pelle and his crew of fashionable small-town Swedish mystiques, the band made their break-through with the vastly popular “Veni Vidi Vicious” in 2000, a good overall rock record by almost all standards, and enjoyable despite the overwhelming success following some serious touting by the British mainstream music press.

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The Cato Salsa Experience are clearly inspired by times long gone. Everything from their name to the artwork to the music itself is unmistakebly retro, but as frontman Cato points out, “We don’t necessarily want the music to be totally retro, maybe some pastiche kind of deal”. And granted, there are hints being dropped throughout “A Good Tip for a Good Time” that the band aren’t taking themselves entirely too seriously. The wholesale embrace of loopy riffs, various effects, “exploding drums” as the band state in the press release, and Detroit-style rock ‘n’ roll gives the record a wholly un-Norwegian energy and flair, all the while making mockery of the original, limiting characteristics of the genre they’ve familiarised themselves with.

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