The day ends in a ‘Y’ so it must be time for a band from Leeds.
DOWNDIME are a quartet firmly planted in the perennial flowering bed of Indie. Opening track ‘Seeds of Hopelessness’ threatens to be some kind of feedback frenzy but its verse is actually rather twee with the plink-plonk keyboard softening any coruscating guitar work. That and the slightly fey vocals of the lead singer: like a cross between Pete Shelley and Brian Molko. The Buzzcocks memory cells are also re-awakened with ‘Existence Is Missing’ but ‘Shine’ reveals their Doors fetish with its psychedelic keyboards and lines like “say hello to Gloria as she grinds me to a fine powder”. Its unmannered DIY musical kaleidoscope makes it the best of the bunch.
Quite evidently doing their own thing DOWNDIME sound like a band destined to remain buried treasure: too self-absorbed (in a good way) to cow-tow to commercial demands and too flaky (again in a good way) to toughen up for repeated beatings with the shitty stick of indifference and the fickle heart of the record buying public. In other words DOWNDIME remind me of many unsigned/badly signed bands I’ve loved down the years along with, seemingly, only one other man and his dog. Heroes all of them but never getting the breaks to reveal their shining gems beyond the front row of half a dozen boozers in half as many postcode sectors.
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Go on DOWNDIME prove me wrong.
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