Youthful reminiscing and off-beat indie pop bring Doomshakalaka's debut to life

While he might not have had the same cultural impact on the nation as Peel might have done, Kennedy, and the bands he championed, managed to show me and countless others, that indie music wasn’t just the middle class pretending to be working class. It could be as offbeat, as optimistic, and as idiosyncratic as you liked.

One such was Hot Club De Paris, a Liverpool based who dropped a smattering of anarchic indie-pop releases over roughly five years before seemingly vanishing. Thankfully, eight years down the line, Hot Club singer and bassist Paul Rafferty is back with new outfit Doomshakalaka, whose debut has been carefully pieced together over the years since Rafferty’s 30th birthday.

“It’s largely a record about remembering moments from my teens and 20s and what those moments mean to me now.” explains Rafferty “I love the texture that ageing brings to an artist’s output. I like the sound of a big hole dug deep.”

The result is ten tracks of offbeat indie-pop; the arrangements of which offering as much surprises as the youth in which they document. Opening number "One Last Saturday Night" is a love-letter to said youth, while following track "The Curse" is a hazy, loping affair that explores that importance of places and of people in our memories.

Such thoughts and themes will be universal to many. But even when Rafferty delves deeper in to his own personal experiences and memories, that of an high school art teacher on "Skinhead Suit" or his discovery of a teenager’s homework on the outskirts of Chicago on the psychedelic "The Lost Homework of Elizabeth Perez", it still adds to record’s wistful and evocative nature, in turn conjuring memories of one’s own youth and the feelings that brings with it.

A record that relishes in a hazy sense of nostalgia, Doomshakalaka brings to mind the same type of dewey-eyed romanticism as Manchester’s Songs for Walter, in that it makes you pine for memories you never had, and make you miss people you never knew. It’s indie-pop, but not as you might expect it. And that’s what makes it all the more beguiling.