Taffy – Caramel Sunset

In the UK, Britpop’s spectre – not Pulp or Blur, but the bread and butter bands that once padded out Shine compilations – has kept a penitently low profile of late, with recent home-grown nostalgia hits chiefly inspired by the shoegazing late-eighties or alt-rock early-nineties (not that we’re complaining – the appeal of fuzzy guitars and sugary choruses of any vintage is ever-strong round our way).

Japan’s Taffy, by comparison, have a crush on the period’s produce and no qualms about showing it, creating an album with instant appeal that suggests it sometimes takes an outside perspective to pinpoint what makes a genre click. They pay particular tribute to female-fronted acts like Sleeper and Echobelly, with the chords of opener Between making a slight return to It Girl aesthetics, while So Long rinses great things in Iris’s candied vocals. Punk as at heart, Taffy are retrograde and proud; old-fashioned yet, somehow, never passé.