Please auto-enrol for Autocamper here ...

... yeah, auto-enrol (whatever that means). But anyway, having seen three very good gigs from Autocamper in the past few weeks I'm enrolling on my very own blog about this oh-so-happening band. Check 'em out. They're "jangle-pop", or "C86 pop", or er, just pop. Or maybe none of these things. Dunno, really. When I hear the rapid rhythm guitar, groovy bass and jerky drumming on a song like Dogsitting I'm put in mind of 80s indie (mini-) heroes Mighty Mighty or (maxi-) heroes the Wedding Present. And then there are conceivably echoes of the Weather Prophets, or - indie fanfare - of Orange Juice and even - maybe, maybe not - Echo & The Bunnymen. Or most likely I'm imagining all these associations? I guess it doesn't overly matter. Autocamper are not one-dimensional anyway. They do slow stuff and fast stuff, music that sounds like pop music but is possibly too intricate/complex to really be pop music. Anyway, a few things I like: the dragging, flat tones of the singing from Jack Hawkins; the backing vocals of the keyboardist (Niamh) as well as her keyboard sounds; the use of choppy rhythm guitar; also some of the nice lead guitar parts. It's (I guess) groovy, it's ultra-tuneful*, and ... it's not boring. Hmm, I ought to go into the business of being a professional record reviewer. Anyway, if I'd just stumbled across Autocamper on Bandcamp I reckon I'd like their stuff but it wouldn't have registered the way it has from seeing them live. They were decent (in fact very good) when I saw them late last year - infectious and sort of funny - and I liked them in the same way that I already liked Sheffield's excellent Thee Mightees, Bristol's Silk Cuts or Baltimore's The Smashing Times (as different as these bands are, same terrain but music in different kitchens). And that's pretty much how they still seem to me. Except they come across as a bit more fired up and intense these days. At their June gig at the Hallamshire in Sheffield, they appeared to be in the middle of a band argument (or perhaps I imagined this?). In any case, there seemed to be a tension in the way they pumped out their stuff, not helped by being stranded atop the Hallamshire's horribly-high stage in what must be one of the least-appealing small-scale venues in the country (put it this way: I'll never go back there). At the Shacklewell Arms in east London this week, on (my) home turf, they played a crisp 35-minute set in a pretty sweltering room. It really worked. Fast-and-slow jangle-pop (or whatever) played with seriousness and intensity. Even with a hint of snarl. Lots of tracks off their excellent What Do You Do All Day? album - named, no doubt, as a comment on my own indolent lifestyle - played in front of a biggish audience (big by my gig-going standards, ie about 75 people). I also liked the remark from Hawkins about how he wrote one of the songs "in 1987", which was er, probably untrue. (Jangle-pop never dies). Meanwhile, in Coventry (Just Dropped In Records) last night, they played the same set to the same standard, just with a few extra garnishes: Hawkins jokingly (?) berating some of the audience for sitting down ("hippies"), while also crunching into some of the lyrics as if slightly disgusted by what he was singing. That's it Jack, get it off your chest. No, I like this touch of anger in a band ostensibly dealing with romantic pop music. And yep, that's the end of the auto-enrolment process ...

*My pop music-phobic partner says they're "tone-deaf", which er, might even be true. And if it is true it's probably exactly why I like them. I don't suppose they think they are though.

Everything's gonna be alright: Autocamper don't like hippies