Who is in need of some Anarcho Indie Pop?  If you answered in the negative, I suspect you may be being premature in your judgment if you’ve not yet immersed yourself in the rather bewitching sounds of Twelve Cubic Feet.

I have always felt that hardcore punk benefits more than most musical subcultures from having a healthy regard for its past, to better understand its musical trajectories and, perhaps more importantly, the evolution of its political conversations.  But, at times, when you survey wider musical culture, it can feel like we are being slowly drowned in the nostalgia of reunion tours and lavishly repackaged vinyl reissues.  And as the Austrian composer Gustav Mahler once said, admittedly almost certainly not with hardcore in mind, ‘Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire’.

Yet a couple of La Vida Es Un Mus Discos offshoots, Sealed Records and Demo Tape Records, consistently serve to remind us that there remains real value in excavating our musical ashes.  They have both brought back to life the recordings of some great bands who are now barely remembered yet, with hindsight, forged sounds that were often instrumental in shaping our musical futures.  And Sealed Records have uncovered another gem in Twelve Cubic Feet with the reissue of their 1982 album on Namedrop Records, Straight Out The Fridge.

Sealed’s tentatively proffered suggestion of ‘Anarcho Indie Pop’ is an apt one.  The band’s sound is fragile yet fully realised – clean, jangly guitars, a jazz accented rhythm section, and warmly organic keyboards provide the perfect backdrop to dual vocalists of a post-punk persuasion and a keen pop sensibility.  The result is an album saturated in an early 1980s English aesthetic that feels concurrently both bleak and uplifting, and sadly still rather pertinent to our current malaise.  And there are standout moments aplenty – from when the band locks into an extended instrumental crescendo to the ruminative The Almhouse built around an otherworldly keyboard motif, to the infectious vocal harmonies that propel Escaping Again.  And the final track Tuesday Afternoon brings it all together quite brilliantly.  An unexpected treat.