Credit: Found On Internet

“Landfill Indie”. That’s the media phrase of the moment. Coined by The Grauniad’s Alex Petridis to describe the dearth of ditch-dull indiclones clogging up Glastonbury this year. Since then it’s become the latest buzzword among lazy hacks (like us) to dismiss the latest Pigeon Detectives single, and their odious ilk.

Landfill Indie though, is everything Pope Joan aren’t. What Pope Joan are is another kettle of frustrations altogether.

Sure, there’s about a fist and a half of obvious nods to their influences on Hot Water, Lines and Rickety Machines, the debut album from the Brighton foursome, but they’ve looked beyond boorish Britpop and a Best-of by The Smiths for inspiration. There are tinges of Nick Zimmer to their guitar licks, be it the arms-length ‘An Alternative Route To The End’ and ‘A Piece of String’. Then every now and then a whiff of Fugazi slips in from nowhere, and you find yourself double-taking like an idiot as your eardrums desperately claw around trying (and failing) to pick up the trace again. It’s like bumping into an old girlfriend and not being able to remember her surname – there might be buxom obviousness in front of you, but the tiny parts you can’t quite grasp are the bits you want to rediscover the most. ‘Nothing Is Too Much’ is on repeat as I keep searching for it.

Pope Joan perform ‘Pocketful Of Change’ at Notting Hill’s weekly RoTa show:

A few weeks ago, Music Towers found ourselves in one of those Hoxton cockdens, the kind of bar frequented by the East End noveau-indie-rich that moved in since the Nathan Barley-types were shamed back into hiding in their converted biscuit tin lids they pretend are studio lofts. We were there because we wanted to see for certain if Pope Joan could continue this trick of keeping us listening.

They almost – almost got away with it, but for the artrock rattle of ‘Our Cuisine’ and ’49 Years Time’ – suddenly the clumsy lyrics, playing so hard with their student politics, make us cringe. We feel the metallic edge of blood in our mouths as we grind our molars to lines like “We like spice in our cuisine / as long as we don’t have to let them in” as the band sneer at middle-England’s Daily Mail-brand of hatemongering. It’s so earnestly well-meaning, so bluntly-depthless as the misinformation it derides that it makes us seethe.