As with many parents, my father has a tendency to get details about my life and interests slightly muddled up. As with many sons and daughters, I have difficulty telling when he’s genuinely confused or attempting a joke.

To this day, I’m not sure whether it was a poor memory or an attempt at humour which prompted him to explain a few years back that one of my favourite bands at the time was Shed Club Seven.

It’s an interesting idea. Maybe we could also have the Rolling Stone Roses, The Big Pink Floyd or TV on the Radiohead. Please text any other band fusion ideas to…any mobile number of your choosing.

But then, there is something in my dad’s unwitting merging of teenybopper pop and 90s indie. Fans of alternative music, be it thumping metal through to morose bedsit singer/songwriter noodlings tend to cast derogatory sneers towards their younger brothers and sisters listening with sheep-like devotion to Moyles and Cotton on Radio 1.

And much of the time they - I mean we - are right to do so. But a little bit of bubblegum pop never hurt anyone and occasionally, just occasionally, something will happen in that mainstream world of luminous pink and sugariness that will make even devotees of 6Music, Xfm or Absolute sit up and take note. And sometimes, just sometimes, the two worlds will collide.

So it is with Morning Fuzz who find themselves at the poppy end of the indie spectrum. Their four track EP, Shadows in the Rearview is a collection of light indie songs informed by the sounds of 80s U2 (there’s much of Bono’s impassioned back of the throat straining in “Sever the Range”) through to Maxïmo Park via any number of mid to late 90s indie acts.

And yet the influence of pop is never far away. “Stevie” could easily be Everything Must Go era Manic Street Preachers covering a recent Take That track (now, there’s a bizarre thought). That’s the soundtrack for the next Morrisons advert taken care of then. It’s an upbeat, bright, breezy and catchy collection of radio friendly tunes. Well, they might have to bleep out the word “bullshit” when Scott Mills or Chris Evans play it, but you get what I mean. As the lyrics of “Stevie” themselves admit: “you can hum along”. Indeed you can.

The lyrics cover common themes found in both pop and indie: overcoming strife and looking to the future. Isn’t that what “Reach for the Stars” and “The Greatest Day” were all about? There’s plenty of references to weather throughout the lyrics with “I can’t stop the rain and I can’t calm the sun” in “Short Cuts” and “the thunder clouds are roaring/there is a storm inside of me” in “Got Down” which illustrate the themes.

There’s also the oft repeated references to shadows, stars and looking into the distance. But there’s also some more interesting imagery in there like “We’re dangling cocoons” in “Sever the Range” and “We’re coasting on ethanol” in “Short Cuts”. It’s a shame there aren’t more chemistry themed lyrics in music.

This is fun, bouncy guitar pop, happily shading in the intersections of the Venn diagram where mainstream pop and alternative music meet. It’ll never set the world alight, but it may raise a smile or two to get you on your way.

20/04/11