Review: The Scones – The Trouble with Thompson EP

R E V I E W
The Scones – The Trouble with Thompson EP
By Ian Duggan

A couple of months ago I reviewed The Scones EP, ‘Go Ahead, Bake my Day’, which is available via Soundcloud. It turns out, however, that this wasn’t considered by the band to be an official release at all, but merely a collection of rough recordings posted on the internet. Now, though, they give us their first official release, the five track EP ‘The Trouble with Thompson’.
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A couple of songs on the EP are derived from those early sessions, ‘Scones’ and ‘The Red MG’. Scones is a great little song, upbeat and with interesting, light-hearted lyrics, which essentially makes a comparison between people and scones. The lyric “They’re Sultanas, from Foodtown” perhaps gives an idea that some of these songs have been around for a little while, with Foodtown having shut its doors around four years ago; nothing a change to its rhyming replacement Countdown wouldn’t fix, perhaps! ‘The Red MG’ I find to be another highlight, with its chord progressions and vocals somewhat reminiscent of mid-career The Verlaines. However, while some of the early songs gave a suggestion of a heavy Flying Nun influence, this is far less evident in the previously unreleased tracks here. This is a band that seems to be finding its own voice, with its own style.

Overall, this is a great collection of well-crafted pop songs, both musically and lyrically. I hope The Scones gain the following they deserve based on their outputs to date, both from Hamilton punters and elsewhere, and that they continue to keep cooking up further pop gems for a while yet.

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