:: Merchandise ::
23 February 2009 / Cityscape / 2 Trk CD
By Emily Slowlie

Brad B Wood and Conrad Astley sustain those immovable smiles as they prepare us for the summer with another dose of bright guitar pop. “Listen Up!” provides the kind of happy-feel-good music that the Lightening Seeds were so adept at serving up at regular intervals. The layered vocals and harmonies have the rustic-city-based-charm of Badly Drawn Boy, where the melodies shuffle between acoustic and electric guitars amid the plinked highlights of piano. Merchandise are unashamedly content with this kind of lightly whipped tunefulness and all that’s missing in this formula, is an absolute killer tune – I don’t think they’re far off serving it up either. They plunder a well trodden mine of music and they should, to their credit , exploit it