DMA’s: Hills End

That’s hardly a surprise – the Sydney trio is without doubt an indie Britpop band, just one that’s half the world away from the UK and 20-odd years too late to the party.

You can’t knock their influences. British music in the mid-’90s was brilliant. Blood was shed in my school’s playground over the perceived merits of Blur versus Oasis. Bands were worth fighting for.Well, most of them. For every Pulp there were a thousand Dodgys. For every La’s a Shed Seven. There were truckloads of generic dreck between the classics, cluttering up the cassette mix you’d stolen off your older brother.

Hills End has some solid, anthemic material (‘Delete’ and ‘Play It Out’, for example) that you’ll be singing aloud with a pal in one hand and a pint aloft in the other. There are blissful, pop-Valium-with-the-curtains-closed acoustic numbers like ‘The Switch’ and ‘Step Up The Morphine’. But there’s a lot of just-another-jangly-indie-song that wouldn’t have cut it in 1995 and doesn’t today either.

For now, they’re a little stuck in sound-alike mode. Soon, though, they’ll have their day in the sunsheeeeine, and be worth fighting for.