The Little Ones - Sing Song

Shh! Listen! No, not to the twittering birds or frolicking animals, or any of the other signs of our current, freakish, global warming-induced climate - it’s the sound of The Little Ones, bringing the sunshine from California, ready to tell us that summer’s on the way with ‘Sing Song’, the most blissfully perfect mini-album we’re ever likely to hear.

It could have been your average keyboardy, Shins-ish sunshine pop (though how anything Shins-ish that features keyboards could be average is beyond us), but the opening ‘woah-oh-oh-oh’ harmonies on ‘Let Them Ring The Bells’ dispels such fears. Likewise, former singles ‘Lovers Who Uncover’ (bearing more than a passing resemblance to that other piece of sunshine pop, ‘Oh Mandy’ by The Spinto Band) and ‘Oh, MJ!’ are tracks of such unsquashable optimism and beauty that listening to them brings a tearful grin to the face of even the most hardened cynic.

All perfect harmonies, joyous handclaps and surface smiles masking buried heartache, they’re like an even sweeter Magic Numbers, with the added bonus of tremulous album highlight ‘Cha Cha Cha’. If ‘Sing Song’ doesn’t single-handedly instigate a Summer of Love, nothing will.