Joyous technicolour indie pop is one of the tags that Oxford five piece Alphabet Backwards use to pigeonhole their sound. We wouldn’t disagree. We guarantee that just a single listen to the one-hundred-mile-an-hour vocals and bee like squiggles of keyboard flourishes on their song Elton John will have you grinning like Colin Firth at the BAFTA’s. Po faced indie miserabilists begone because Alphabet Backwards are fun.
Yet fun doesn’t mean empty. Music snobs often carry perceptions that something happy sounding is somehow of less worth; that the only way to find the greatest music is to delve into deeper darker basements of complex arrangements, weirdness and leftfield strangeness. Such snobs will probably hold the belief that true art can only come from torment, from wretched gutter living and from squalid despair. Breaking More Waves says bollocks to such beliefs.
Great art comes from great talent and those who work at their craft get results. There can be just as much worth in a vibrantly perky sounding piece of d-i-y indie pop as something heavily nihilist.
Of course we’re not proclaiming Alphabet Backwards to be making anything near great art, but just because their songs are jolly, don’t close your ears off. Accept that a band who lists their interests as knitting, aeroplanes, ducks, records, acting, squash, pictures, fashion, summer, disco, bears, Annie, eighties, and eating sweets can make delightful indie pop songs that are as colourful as dancing rainbows.
Elton John by alphabet backwards
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