Fierce Panda: best indie label in the UK? It’s a title worth an argument or two over at least. So you’ll be wanting some evidence then I suppose? Alright, what about these 16 tracks culled from Panda releases over the last year (singles, b-sides, album tracks), thrown together onto a CD with some footballers on the front (no doubt drawing a quaint but accurate analogy/cliché between the collective power of a team and that no signing should be hoisted above the sum of all its parts) and put into the shops for an applaudable and slightly unbelievable £3.99? Well that’ll do for starters, yeah. It’s easy to forget about Fierce Panda with the frequency that some acts, picked from obscurity with a single deal, leap frog onto bigger/better/all-of-the-above things. Ultrasound, Hundred Reasons 3 Colours Red and most notably Coldplay were reared by the hands of the Panda over recent years.
So who knows exactly what you hold in your hands with this one. The rampant hit and miss Seafood (hitting bullseye with some celebratory splashes of watercolour on the Delgados-esque ‘People Are Underestimated’) have been grabbed by Infectious already and The Music (largely rubbish on record so far, but this live b-side of ‘The Walls Get Smaller’ will catch your speakers unawares) by Hut under a flurry of daft future-o-music hysteria. Anthemic floppy fringed indie of the variety that’d make Ash coo comes from Easyworld on their way over to Jive records, and if Medium 21, here with the Weezer hit over the head by Stephen Malkmus’ acoustic guitar ‘By My Side’ don’t make serious inroads soon we’ll give ourselves two black eyes.
There are the sideways indie kids writing pop tunes (Ireland’s Simple Kid, Norwich’s Kaito and the breathtakingly glorious Death Cab For Cutie with the sad jumpy ‘Styrofoam Plates’), the ones that don’t write quite get as far as pop tunes (Fiver’s lush psychedelic ‘Chalet Motel’, Coin-Op with a quest to suffocate all melody with crackle and Phonotype with a soaring epic), the dark and the aggressive (Caretaker, (X) Is Greater Than (Y) and the striking Lapsus Linguae) and some nightmare inducing techno (Twig’s ‘Pump Me Like A Burger King). Then Astronaut seal it all off with an final-song-of-the-prom 50’s indie smooch-a-thon on ‘Save Me’. Don’t try and put it in order or work it out. Just listen. Enjoy the sloppy grin its given you. Then go and find out where they came from. We challenge you to find us a better collection of guitar eclecticism anywhere this year.