Pop music's DNA is powerful stuff. You can bury it in vaults weighed down with monster trucks full of arena staging and publisher invoices. But it still keeps on breaking out into the wild.
Take THE OLD HOUSE for example. Despite a gestation period in the frozen wastes of Wakefield in Yorkshire, pretty well 90% of the original gene pool is still there in the short guitar riffs and classic three-chord shapes. All the basic things from Del Shannon, Martha and The Vandellas, through The Velvet Underground to Stephen Malkmus are boiling and festering away inside. The evolutionary mutation isn’t something cooked by musicologists from record collections and post modern degree courses – these guys just lapped up the clearest currents available from the cosmic mud of MTVland, cleaned it up and threw out the junk.
The ingredients that remain are simple, fresh and raw. These four songs are more than justification for THE OLD HOUSE's appearance on the recent "Dance to the Radio" compilation and their picture in this week's NME. It's springy, woo hoo chiming stuff. Two guitars, bass and drums and two unselfconsciously not great voices make up the simple sound.
It’s a sound that you might file alongside some very current indie pop Brits, but a closer listen brings Malkmus and Reed to mind, with their distinctly punk approach to the technical niceties of pitch and breath control. Chris Billingham and Craig Newman swap the lead singing role while Paul Reid props them up from bass. Their recently acquired secret ingredient is the semi-legendary Jamie Lockheart on drums. The potential for life-threatening albums is splattered all over them
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The main thing that separates this band from a thousand other irritating wannabe celebrity velociraptors is their instinctive grip on short stingy guitar tunes – like the mnemonically unremovable ne naaah na nee naaah phrase that starts "Why Can’t You?". Advertisers would die for that kind of stickiness.
"You Told Me Something", "I Don’t Like Reggie" and "Believe" are the songs I haven’t mentioned. Enthusiastic ooo ooos punctuate the tunes. You might be able to persuade the band to send you a copy if you email them nicely. You never know. Their dodgy web site is at the lamentably cheapskate address of www.geocities.com/theoldhouseband/ In the meantime, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
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