Stricken City

Not sure if singer/keyboardist Rebekah Raa is singing in English or not sometimes but it's always very pretty. She gets a lot of comparisons to Bjork but she actually reminds me of an indie pop Siouxsie Sioux in a weird way. The average of those two should give you an idea of her band Stricken City's debut Songs About People I Know.

It's really an unusually lovely album for something so driven by rock beats and tinny guitars. And, though it is often reminiscent of The Sundays, if you can dance to The Smiths, you can dance to this. Unfortunately, like The Sundays, it's not the most musically adventurous stuff and neither is it particularly catchy. Still, it's definitely worth a listen. It's not boring by any means. The touch of '70s punk and new wave in their '80s indie pop sees to that, however, the most interesting thing about this debut is the way the band turns such influences into a work of perfect timeliness. It comes out a kind of sunlit goth rock; ecstatic and strange.