You Favour the Sweeter Ones

Fosca, The Painted Side of the Rocket, 2008
I received today a package from Sweden: the third album from English pop band Fosca. The front cover shows the entrance gates to what looks like a very posh residence (a boarding school? a castle? a private garden?) Fosca are the people sitting by that gate, with their feet in the gutter, thinking of cutting remarks to make to the people on the other side (who won't even get it). They have a very 80s brand of indie sound, from lyrics and song titles that could have come from The Smiths, girls doing the backing vocals and playing the keyboards as if they were The Human League, and jangly guitars that would snuggly fit into the NME's C86 tape. In this day and age, when every radio station only plays bands that got there because of their record exec sugar daddies, there's something neat about a band saying "fuck it, I'm going to sing my life and not try to be the next Amy Winehouse or Pete Doherty, even if it means the end of my career." Playing the unpopular game can sometimes pay dividends, which is what happened to Pulp in the 90s. Fosca's career has slightly paid off in Sweden, where they have a following - not surprising when you think of other popular Swedish bands in the same tradition, like The Concretes and The Cardigans. My favourite songs in this album are Confused and Proud (which reminds me of pop band Dubstar), the melancholic In-Joke for One and Evening Dress at 3pm (a song destined to be covered one day by The Magnetic Fields).

Dickon Edwards, the singer, has a blog feed you can follow on LJ: dickon_atom; and my lovely LJ friend millionreasons plays the keyboard and sings backing vocals (which I suppose makes this post a highly biast one, but whatevah!) A write-up of their recent Swedish mini-tour/adventure is here.

Huggable Rat

Bryan Talbot, The Tale of One Bad Rat, 1996
Boyish-looking Helen runs away from an abusive home to live as a beggar on the streets of London. The only creature she trusts in the whole world is a pet rat she freed from her school's laboratory - a friend who also reminds her of the stories of Beatrix Potter, which she loved as a child and that now serve as a sort of escape route whenever reality gets too rough.

Bryan Talbot's graphic novel is unusual in that it's about child abuse (at a glance, it can even seem like a TV drama transported onto comics) but also the bad reputation that rats have carried for the past centuries. I didn't know, for example, that rats are highly intelligent, and that they can be quite clean since they groom themselves. Almost makes me want to get a pet rat!