My new favourite band Part blah, blah, blah. For anyone taking notes, the Australian and more specifically the Melbourne music scene is in ridiculously rude health right now. Every couple of weeks it seems a new, apparently fully formed band or artist leaps into view. Almost every one of them armed with a gripping new take on familiar pop thrills.
Latest suspects are Program, a young five-piece, whose debut album Show Me dropped just last Friday. Program are reminiscent of other bands on the scene, most immediately Possible Humans and Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever but present their own and highly exciting fresh slant on things.
Show Me hits the ground running with opening track Another Day and then never lets up. Full of moments that relive and revivify the guitar spirit of the years between 1978 and 1984 underlining exactly why that was such a golden pop era, it's an altogether brilliant set.
Essentially the record plays out like a love affair with how good twin guitars can sound together. Offering up reminders of Wire, The Only Ones, Television, The Cars, The Passions, Pylon, The Clean, The Chills and The Go-Betweens but at the same time sounding effortlessly contemporary, the eleven songs here are prosaic, brilliantly plotted (ad)ventures.
Clipped matter of fact one or two word titles clinically demonstrate Program's no thrills, no nonsense approach to things. Fronted by a couple of singers taking turns at the mic, one slightly ingenue the other more worldly wise, the songs concerns are fascinating if oblique.
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