News Mood Rings

There can be fewer things more meaningless than a ‘like’ on Facebook, a tool devised for people to show their love of forgotten 80’s daytime television programmes, flavours of jelly and in-jokes all with the click of a button. Mood Rings are a band who have had 52 people click to say that they ‘like’ their debut EP, ‘Sweater Weather Forever’, but their music is worth a lot more than another ridiculous feature on somebody’s social media news feed.

The sonic aesthetic is one stolen from shoegaze, the layered melodies channelled through a stoic, old amp with a hint of an old rock and roll time signature thrown in for good measure. It’s hardly something that you’ve not heard before - all breezy delivery, distant vocals and a string hint that it might’ve all been thrown together in a bedroom after someone had just played a bit of the Beach House record, but it certainly hits the spot. Towards the end of the four tracks, it even manages to hint upon the kind of grunge that has seen Yuck make a serviceable career out of things, before snapping back to being a kind of preppy My Bloody Valentine-lite, something that serves them a lot better.

It’s not only a handful of people on FaceBook who’ve beaten you to the reverb heavy punch - the people at doublephantom.com were at the front of the queue, with Pink House Tapes doing the honourable thing and giving people with a Walkman something to listen to on their jogs or whatever they do. Given the backwards nature of hipster culture, they’re probably the same people who’ve been doing the ‘like’-ing, too.