The Start of Us, off their eponymous latest album

I caught Hong Kong-based indie band, Noughts and Exes on Saturday night at Clarke Quay, and in spite of hearing a bunch of other bands after, I couldn't get their music out of my head later that night.

Noughts and Exes is a six-piece folk rock band—or at least it was presented quite folk rock, later I realised the recording's music arrangement was more folk pop—that look like they stepped straight out of YouTube.

By this I mean hipster outfits (read: suspenders, page boy hats, checkered pants) and a bunch of toy instruments like melodicas, glockenspiels, and at one point a typewriter for percussion.

These visual distractions did help to add colour to their live performance, but I thought the songs were strong enough on their own and didn't benefit from the band's live execution. 

Numbers such as The Start of Us carried good hooks and overall strong melody lines, which came out well in the recordings. 

Unfortunately, the band's performance on Saturday had many of the instruments vying with each other for the mid-line. The guitar, keyboard, violin and even bass guitar were pushing the songs' underlying hook repeatedly, none of them taking turns, so each song came out driving at that middle range with no relief.

Furthermore, the unnecessarily heavy delivery also crowded out frontman, Joshua Wong's vocals, which was a shame. His rather thin timbre suited the songs, but were drowned out by the band's over-enthusiasm. 

Thankfully, this wasn't the case in the recordings so you can hear how they were perhaps meant to sound there. 

The band's less than tight live performance could be put down to their being relatively new as an outfit. 

Noughts and Exes had first first album out in 2007. Its current line up was formed in 2009, with only Joshua Wong and keyboardist, Gideon So, left from its original five members. 

It's also been nice seeing how the band's music had changed over its growth. 

Where A Minor to Major (2007) featured a dreamy rock vibe with electronic loops, The Start of Us from its latest album released late last year features a more (ironically) consumable indie sound now. I think it suits them, and going by the crowd's reaction last night, marks a promising path towards the mass English-speaking fanbase in the region for them.

A Minor to Major

Track #1: Walking Far From Home

When you approach an Iron & Wine album, you always have to remember that its DNA is poetry.

And with Sam Beam’s lyrical metre comes the rhythmic highs and lows of a typical Iron & Wine song. Usually relying on a repeated riff running under each song, these tend to be verse-driven with a short refrain marking the “breaths” between each verse.

This format has marked Beam’s previous albums and is still very apparent in Kiss Each Other Clean, released earlier in January this year.

What’s different, however, is the addition of multiple instruments and studio effects. It isn’t exactly a full departure from Iron & Wine’s signature acoustic folk, but Beam’s voice coming out more powerfully in the album plus saxophone solos distinguishes this album from his typical wispy double-vocal sound.

Beam acknowledged this in an October 2010 interview with SPIN, saying the record is more pop, and “sounds like the music people heard in their parent's car growing up…that early-to-mid-'70s FM, radio-friendly music".

Personally, I think that label oversimplifies the album, which carries far more lyrically complex songs than any ‘70s radio pop number.

But while the album was meant to draw a more mainstream ear in, I’m not sure it’ll do that. Compared with melodic songs like 2007’s “Flightless Bird, American Mouth” or his 2004 hit, “The Trapeze Swinger”, the songs in this album need a couple of listens before the intricacies of the songwriting sink in.

Without many instantly-memorable anthemns, Kiss Each Other Clean won’t find itself on the Top 40 charts easily—although considering what’s populating the charts today, that is no insult to the album at all.

Still, there are songs that stand out as pleasant, radio-ready tracks. The opening track, “Walking Far From Home”, is a great choice to kick off the album, with its lightly muted overdriven guitar in the background. Track 7, “Godless Brother In Love”, is ready to be included in a movie soundtrack.

Some of his creative choices are questionable, however; I’m still undecided as to whether I like his voice being run through an effects box for “Rabbit Will Run” and “Big Burned Hand”.

Kiss Each Other Clean builds on the introduction of new genres into Beam’s music, which has been seeping in over the past several EPs and full albums.

Whether you like the direction in which it’s going, it can be agreed that the journey of Beam’s creative growth is a fascinating one to observe.

Jilted Lovers & Broken Hearts

Who better to release a homage to Las Vegas than flamboyant Nevada native, Brandon Flowers?

Flowers' solo debut away from his day job as The Killers' frontman, sees him exploring a more mature sound from The Killers' post-punk revival guitar work.

This isn't to say that it's wildly different from what we'd expect; Flamingo's tracks, written on tour with The Killers, is still unmistakably Brandon Flowers.

It is also unmistakably Las Vegas, heavy with symbolism peppered liberally throughout the album, and at times a little too obviously so.

The opening track, Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas, starts with sounds of, presumably, the Nevada desert.

The lyrics sound like an ad for Sin City: "Sunsets and neon lights / Call girls and neon lights / Blackjack and lady luck / Cocaine and lady luck".

Other tracks also throw gambling metaphors in your face: "Why did you roll your dice / Show your cards", Flowers asks in Jilted Lovers & Broken Hearts.

Competing for attention is the Christian iconography marking every other track in the album.

Flowers, who grew up Mormon but was not an active church-goer when he moved back to Las Vegas from Utah as a teen, sings in Playing With Fire: "This Church of mine  may not be recognised by steeple / But that doesn't mean I will walk without a God".

Track 9, On the Floor, goes Church choir, backed by an organ and a full vocal troupe.

Flowers' exploration of a slightly new sound in the album is rewarded with a few radio-worthy rock ballads, but also falls flat at his lack of vocal prowess to carry some of the more ambitious songs.

Track 10, Swallow It, relies strongly on the vocal line, and as such starts to grate early on with his indulgent, yet imprecise hitting of the notes. One can't help but wonder how much better the song would sound in a more competent singer's hands.

As a continuation of Flowers' songwriting efforts, Flamingo is a decent stab at including several—but not too many—new elements into his work. But it is let down by cheesy lyrics and the failure to fully achieve its vision as a documentary of Americana.

The music of oldfish sounds like it would fit perfectly in an indie romantic comedy's soundtrack—light, whimsical tunes resting on bossa nova and downtempo beats.

Produced and written by Korean one-man show, "Soda", the loungey tunes with muted electronica mix pleasantly with Soda's acoustic guitar work and vocals.

I appreciated how the use of electronic instruments wasn't as in-your-face as what we hear on the radio these days. The electronic beats were set as a bassline for the songs, which relied mostly on natural-sound instruments like the guitar and piano for the rhythm section.

Contrast this with Owl City's Fireflies, for example, which uses electronica for its recurring riff as well as the bass and drumlines.

Soda's whispery vocals fit into the dreamy feel of the songs perfectly, but they tend to lose the listener's attention towards the mid-point of each album. Without an anchoring point to listen to in each song, the tracks ended up melting into a Shibuya-kei backdrop eventually.

One gets the feeling that Oldfish's third album, Three Years and Third (2008), was meant to appeal to a wider audience. Earlier albums, Room.ing (2005) and Acoustic Movement (2007) carried more experimental sounds peppered throughout the track list.

OZ from Room.img, for example, broke off from oldfish's typical sound midway into a grunge rock number, with fuzzy distorted guitar backing stronger female vocals.

Three Years and Third repeated elements of earlier hits, which tended to be catchy, light electro-folk ditties with more obvious hooks marking the songs.

Being able to appeal to a wider audience could be validating for an indie artist into his eighth year of putting out records and playing gigs. But in sticking to a tried and tested formula, oldfish also risks losing the edge that made his music characteristically his, in the first place.

그렇게 잘못했던 날 (Track 3) from Three Years and Third