What We've Been Listening To This Week...Pottery, Spider Noises, Superdrone, the Suncharms and Mirrorlakes

By Jon Milton and Ian Smith

This weeks’ been pretty quiet for new single releases, and far more notable for the albums that have come out. And there have been some good ones too. 

Pottery released their debut album on Friday and let me tell you, it’s a beauty. The band released an EP last year called ‘No. 1’ with some decent tracks on it but none of those compare to what’s on offer here. It’s as though they’ve come of age. Welcome to Bobby’s Motel starts off at a furious pace and the party pretty much continues throughout. They sound a lot like Talking Heads at times, particularly on tracks like Hot Heater, Take your Time and What’s in Fashion, but a contemporary, souped-up version. 

There is a lot of inventiveness going on here, with each song underpinned by some phenomenal drumming and lots of changes in direction – take Under the Wires for example which starts out as a regular song but then breaks out into a funky workout mid-way through before segueing into the song that follows (Bobby’s Forecast) which is funky workout all the way through. Or Down in the Dumps, which begins in a muted fashion before kicking into another frenetic workout and then calms itself down before morphing into the more sedate Reflection. Reflection forms a brief respite as its followed by Texas Drums (Pt I & Pt II), a turbo charged party piece a little reminiscent of Teardrop Explodes’ Reward and as its title suggests, a song of two parts.

NY Inn and Take your Time keep the pace fast and furious, with the more measured What’s in Fashion sandwiched in between, before the album bows out with Hot Like Jungle. Welcome to Bobby’s Motel is a phenomenal album from start to finish, and it will undoubtedly be up there with the best of 2020. There’s a few vinyl bundles out there if that takes your fancy too, I’ve opted for the hot dog mustard coloured vinyl version, with zine, bobby socks and badge! Check out your options here. 

Elsewhere this week we wrote about the new album by Superdrone ‘most definitely an album for the summer, grab a martini, a deckchair and some light reading’ and two albums by Spider Noises (their debut and a compilation of tracks from 2016 to 2019, which both show immense promise. We also wrote about a split tape release out last month from  Shiny Happy Records featuring Suncharms and Mirrorlakes ‘a rather charming little release’ all in all.
​
Next week sees a couple of excellent singles from the C33’s and the Novus respectively which we’ll write about nearer the time of release, so keep an eye out for those.