Limbo. It’s a funny place to be, but it provided inspiration for the second album from Standard Fare, the Sheffield-based indie-pop power trio who debuted with 2010’s The Noyelle Beat, their lovelorn, melodic songs and male/female vocals making them the new darlings of the indie-pop scene.

“We're now in our mid twenties – not young and not old, not yet with kids but starting to earn money, starting to see how we fit into the wider world and how we feel about this,” says singer/bassist Emma Cooper. “The album's lyrics are a bit more mature than our debut – we didn't want to just write about our romantic failures and frustrations, although they're hard to avoid!”

These 12 tracks, then, concern subject matter as varied as the Holocaust (recent single Suitcase, written about a survivor and friend of Emma’s family who recently passed away), bitterness (Kicking Puddles), frustration (Dead Future), divided families (Half Sister) and unfaithfulness (Early That Night). With the widening lyrical scope, the album’s texture has become more diverse too, with a greater contrast between heavy and light, fast and slow, dancefloor and bedroom. The guitars are beefed up, the melodies are unbeatable and the words are flecked with wicked humour.

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 Hot on the heels of their eponymous debut album (released on Smalltown Supersound in March ’11), Finnish electro-rock-stomp trio K-X-P are set to unleash a brand new three-track EP to mark their signing to Manchester’s Melodic label.

If the music contained within proves tricky to categorise, don’t expect any help from the band. With elements of glam rock, detroit techno, kraut rock, black metal, early electronica and much more in their minimalist music, are they an electronic band, a rock band, a punk band, a prog band, a pop band? “I kind of hope we can transcend those by-now-useless categories and become something more,” says Tuomo Puranen (bass, keyboards and the ‘P’ in the band’s name). “We’re an abstract sculpture made of sound and flesh!”

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 Recorded away from their residential Manchester in a remote and isolated location, Patterns – made up of Ciaran McAuley (vocals/guitar/keyboards), Alex Hillhouse (bass/samplers), Jamie Lynch (drums) and Laurence Radford (guitar/samplers) – emerge out of the darkness with this, their brilliant shimmering debut single on Melodic.

Both ‘Induction’ and ‘Throwing Stones’ echo their rural hideout’s open terrain and almost cinematic space, evoking a setting where time becomes irrelevant, cast aside as the man made creation it is, and days become lost in quiet reflection, a melancholic tinge affecting the tracks as a result. Patterns’ lead singer Ciaran McAuley paints a more abstract picture, “we wanted to evoke the kind of woozy hynotic space you get when you’re somewhere between sleeping and being awake,” he explains, “the weird mix of memories and visions you get when you’re disassociated from your body.”

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Back with new single ‘Suitcase’ Standard Fare push their juxtaposition between sonically upbeat and lyrically dark to their furthest point yet. Recorded in just one day, ‘Suitcase’ is an initially infectious listen, the track laced with a simple but fully-felt rousing euphoria that feels brighter than anything the group have done previously. Scratch the surface though and you’ll find a blacker tone, the song thematically seeing its narrator preparing for a nuclear fallout, equipped with “a bunker in my backyard filled with tins and dried fruit,” her only fear being “how am I gonna save my family?”

It’s a startlingly solemn topic to find hidden away amongst such a sugar-coated gem, and yet female vocalist Emma puts a different spin on it; “it’s actually quite an uplifting song about being prepared for hard times. It touches upon issues of identity and diaspora, and fears of history repeating itself. I wrote it after one of my older Jewish family members passed away - she had survived the holocaust and was hugely inspirational to me.” 

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Minneapolis based chamber-folk sextet Dark Dark Dark revel in the wonder that is around us always. On their breathtaking sophomore album Wild Go, the band has created a stirring reminder to seek out that magic. Their dramatic sound sets Nona Marie Invie’s soaring, haunting voice against age-old instrumentation that evokes the soundtrack to a beautiful film.

The 10-song collection is a marked evolution for the group, which began in 2006 as a collaboration between multi-instrumentalists and singers Nona Marie Invie and Marshall LaCount. These two inspired songwriters bring together disparate influences – including minimalism, New Orleans jazz, Americana, Eastern European folk, and pop – creating something altogether singular and absolutely epic.

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