Describing themselves as “from Earth”, Manchester three piece Mazes have been using the years since they formed in 2009 to put together a considerable back catalogue of driving pop-punk. Combining with great effectiveness the West Coast fuzzy surf guitar licks favoured by Northern Europe’s current spate of garage bands with that most elusive of phenomena: nonchalant cool.
The band’s most recent album, 2014’s ‘Wooden Aquarium’, is eleven tracks of raw youth, sounds like it could have been recorded over a day or two, and is all the better for it. Standout track “Salford” utilises the straight talking lyricism of The Stooges and the female-male duality of Tom Tom Club (“I keep my hair short; my hair short; I live in Salford; in Salford”) and has just been picked up by the 6 Music playlist, suggesting bright things to come from the lads from up North.
Conal Dougan