The Aquarium - The Aquarium

There's something oddly satisfying about an unusually set-up band sounding a lot like a regular group. Piano/vocals and drums duo The Aquarium manage to circumnavigate their instrumentation to sound just like a guitar driven disco-rock band. Sounding like the soundtrack to some sitcom idyllically reminiscing about a carefree youth spent drinking poolside and chasing school buses, The Aquarium are inoffensively funky, head-noddingly chilled and quite safely rocking. Perhaps if they were actually a guitar-driven band, these songs would become lost amongst the market, but as well as the wonderful sounds and timbres Jason Hutto coaxes out of his instrument, there are genuine moments of genre defiance, such as the almost Oi call-and-response at the end of Good People. Combined with a fetishism of random movie clips, it's nice to hear a band who are arty without being po-faced about it. [Ali Maloney]