Music Go Music: Expressions

Much has been made of Music Go Music's Abba tendencies, but to paint this LA band solely with a Scandinavian pop brush is unfair. This debut album is like a cornucopia of 1970s FM radio hits. Combined from three EPs compiled as a hobby – the band's Gala Bell and Kamer Maza are the husband-and-wife team behind Bodies of Water – the original promo copy of this album was titled Greatest Hits. This is what Expressions sounds like – albeit some other bands' greatest hits. Goodbye Everybody is a pitch-perfect take on the Carpenters, Warm in the Shadows is a nine-minute disco epic that Giorgio Moroder would be proud of, and Light of Love is the song that's so Abba you could feasibly plot a movie about a patriarchal mix-up from it. But this is no pastiche; it's knowingly derivative in parts, sure, but writing tracks that sound like pop standards isn't easy. Like the bands MGM are most often compared to, it would be easy (and wrong) to sniffily dismiss them – and there won't be a much more fun record to "woah woah woah" along to in you car too all year. Will Dean