WOODBINE – Tricity Tiara (CD Single, 2000)
The Woodbine sleeve is underweight and diffident, a cut off brown-and-white drawing and some thin brown-on-burnt-orange lettering: so indie that one crassly-placed Tower Records sticker could – did – obscure the band’s name entirely. Luckily it didn’t obscure the Domino catalogue number, so here we are. Woodbine occupy a sliver of territory somewhere between Belle And Sebastian and Bedhead – slow, seldom and sad: their thick-voiced English singer is a bit clumsy, and so’s the guitar, but I worked out after a few listens that the slight ham-fistedness endeared me to the record: so much acoustic British indie is so gossamer that it’s nice to hear a song with mud caked on its boots. The A-Side is pretty and promising, the B-Sides are more interesting, dipping into skeletal narcoleptronica in a similar way to Piano Magic. And the principle that any Domino single is worth taking a punt on is again upheld.