Mad Mackerel Rounds ‘Em Up

Mini Round Up

So we have 200+ songs marked for potential posting sat patiently waiting in our in-box, and a whole host more diligently collected from the nooks and crannies of the web. Time then for a round-up of some of the most deserving of your ears.

Without further ado, lets set out our stall with Aussie troubadour Owls of the Swamp’s beautiful and sweetly sorrowful Happiness Is A Sad Song.

Aisha Burns, is the violinist for the Austin band Balmorhea, but on her debut full-length Life In The Midwater (the deep, dark layer of the ocean that flows far below the surface, just above what we call the deep sea) she reveals herself to possess a voice of pure, crystalline beauty and power that grips from the very first note. Listen to Sold.

[Click through for free download]

Miesha & The Spanks are altogether more primal, Please Don’t Blow comes from forthcoming album Girls Like Wolves and sounds like the bastard lovechild of Joan Jett and L7.

Troubadour Devon Sproule returns with a new body of collaborative work with Mike O’ Neill of Canadian indie band, Inbreds. They will release their new album Colours via Tin Angel Records on 23th September. This is the easy going, country tinged You Can’t Help It.

Reuben Hollebon’s new single Faces is available for free download, and mixes quivering, falsetto vocals with delicate, but tense guitar – file somewhere between Bon Iver and The Savages!

Frankie Rose returns with a new album Herein Wild next month, but in advance of that here she is giving an icy, 80s new-wavish treatment to cartoon punk rockers The Damned’s Street Of Dreams.

The Eversons effervescent indie-pop is at full throttle on the irreverent and summery Creepy from their new three track single of the same name.

Classic college-rockers Throwing Muses are back with a new album – their first in ten years, and Sleepwalking 1 sounds like they’ve never been away.

Cate Le Bon is one of the more interesting and individual singer songwriters around, and this duet titled I Think I Knew with Perfume Genius from her new album Mug Museum is unusually fragile and undeniably lovely.

And sticking with duets, Brooklyn based Kevin Devine will shortly release not one, but two albums Bubblegum and Bulldozer (both out on 14th October). From Bulldozer comes this track For Eugene also featuring none other than longstanding MM fave Isobel Campbell on vocal duties.

Yoofs have a new single For Her, a note perfect exercise in beguiling, jangly indie that is tinged with just the right amount of sorrowful resignation.

And lastly (for now) we have the brilliant first single, After The Flood, from Lil Daggers’ new EP No Pizza No Peace – reverby guitars sprawl under an umbrella of barely restrained menace.