Navvy - 4 Songs

Perhaps they couldn’t find a name for this. Perhaps they just didn’t care. Perhaps it’s a post-modern take on the irrelevancies of record titles; The Kids are downloading tracks these days, who cares for an EP, let alone an album?

Well, we do. ‘4 Songs’ is a rarity: not only an EP that is actually that, a collection of songs too short to be an album, too strong to be a single-plus-b-sides, but one which is so coherent and strong. ‘Robot’, the first track is a frantic brush with art-rock gone pop: the rhythms are erratic, the guitars raw and brash, the lyrics make no sense, but once the call-and-response shared girl/boy vocal duties kick in, it’s not going to budge.

Then there’s ‘Letters’, a sort of anti-love song (it’s faster, brasher and infinitely more cold-hearted than its predecessor, and once again shows off the band’s clever vocal play), and ‘Strange Book’, the weirdest of the lot, being as it is slightly sinister, the backing vocals are more conventional, and the guitars more insistent and less angry.

The gem here, however, is definitely ‘Sticker’, the track which makes you wonder whether sending Polysics to an art school in South Yorkshire is a plan worth undertaking. The pace is upped once more, the vocals (both main and backing) yelp and scream, there’s cowbells galore and it’s barely two minutes of unadulterated fun. More please.