Music

Taking cuddly toys on stage and asking your audience to ‘do’ thumbs-up, à la Tiny Dancers, just isn’t on. Neither is playing music with such a relentless jauntiness and comic, walking-on-the-spot chug that it conjures up the image of The Wurzels winking at you. Some people do like that kind of thing, like Radio 2, which has been playing the band’s single ‘Hannah, We Know’, but even their listeners will struggle with an album of it.

It’s not that Tiny Dancers are an awful band, just that they attempt (and achieve) nothing more than average sing-along indie-pop. But for a group making average sing-along indie-pop, not having irresistible hooks or cloud-bursting anthems is a big problem. Instead they just jangle through every song up to the point when you start to think that maybe this is the big pop tune… only to recede into a syrup of jangly sweetness which rots your ears after 30 seconds. Perhaps they moved too quickly from a feel-good wedding band to a signed-after-five-gigs songwriting one and this stunted their musical puberty because – the Mull Historical-like ‘Hannah…’ and folksy ‘I’ve Got To Go’ aside – they sound like slushy, try-hard indie weaklings. Oddly, they’ve been described at Time Out as a twee, indie Proclaimers or Bluebells (of ‘Young At Heart’ fame). They both might make a great wedding band, but not exactly a classic album-making one.