Various - Going Back To Sleep...

12 song compilation that traces a particular kind of underground indie music that WOE acolytes will be more than familiar with. Tough Love fam The Reds, Pinks & Purples, Daily Toll and Rat Columns all feature (all reliably pinched with the requisite lovelorn longing and hopefulness), alongside long-awaited new material from Carla dal Forno (newsflash and no surprises: she's still good!), and outings from other various outfits we know and love: The Gabys (the north west's very own answer to fog pop), The Hobknobs (new set-up from Lewsberg's Ari van Vliet), I Can I Can't (the now defunct first band featuring members of the Spillage Fete camp), The Sprigs and so forth. Who Cares? might possibly be one of the lesser known names here ,but come through with a lovely dose of dreamzone pop that suggests they wont stay that way for long. Plenty of aesthetic crossover, but the defining unifying trait might well be how home-spun, charmed and charming they all sound, a love letter, in its manner, to a very specific means of creative practice that privileges the sensitive, the intimate, and the unapologetically romantic. You could spend a lifetime chasing such things or simply start with the 42 minutes of Going Back to Sleep.
 
FFO: The Reds, Pinks & Purples, Daily Toll, Rat Columns, Cindy, April Magazine, Lewsberg