SHINIES – Tangle

Manchester’s SHINIES want to ruin your teeth. Their first single, ‘Shola / Pillow Talk’, featured a melting 99 (without a Flake) on the cover and this this follow-up of sun-kissed fuzzy-wuzzy-indie rock is all tied up in strawberry laces. Plus it features some of the sweetest melodies this side of the gentle tinkling of an ice cream truck.

In the meantime, besides shirking dentists the trio have expanded to a four piece, they recorded another AA side - ‘Ennui / Eighteen’ – and released a video for said 7” where they came over all droog-like at the expense of Fun House legend Pat Sharp, albeit in Ninja Turtles masks rather than white shirts and bowlers (which earned them some column inches in the outraged Daily Mail), all whilst layering a hearty dollop of Kevin Shields noise to their guitars and hushed vocal delivery to their already delightfully overdriven melodic garage rock.

The opening two tracks, ‘Taste’ and ‘Salt’, are nearly lost in shoegaze, save for a driving rhythm section that takes centre stage on ‘Vitamins’ – which sounds a little like early Wavves, at their most listenable – and later ‘Plasticine’, the EP’s obvious stand out, which includes a brilliant sleight-of-hand lead guitar-into-solo line and crashing cymbals amidst as catchy a melody as the C86 lot ever penned.

Not unlike peers The History of Apple Pie, SHINIES take on influences from a very specific time period – My Bloody Valentine, The Jesus and Mary Chain et al – and manage to evoke that very specific sound without being tediously derivative. It’s noisy, melodic, wistful and fun; in fact ‘Salt’ recommends the ideal time to listen to ‘Tangle’: ‘On nights like these”, whilst you “Drive to the sea’.