Sundae Club are "a name you'll be hearing more and more in the months to come". That's what they say on the track "In Love With Sundae Club", and we can only hope and pray that they are right.

In Love With Sundae Club:

Sundae Club, whose two members consist of Hamstell Ridware and Dr. C. D. Mille, may well be one of the best musical acts to appear this year. And no, I'm not just talking about the local Gloucestershire scene. I am talking nationally.

With an imaginative blend of vintage synths, whacky samples and modern beats, Sundae Club reach the parts other desserts can't.

Pick 'n' Mix:

Every track has a story behind it. "Frankie and Tronny" is a tribute to the style of a pianist from many moons ago by the name of Frankie Carl. The "Tronny" element comes from the fact that accompanying instrumentation is provided by a Melotron. It is this kind of philosophy that sums Sundae Club up: they take an assortment of different ideas and merge them together to form something truly original.

This is done with much success elsewhere. "The Brummagem Fly" takes the sample of an old man talking about life on the canals and plays it over the top of glockenspiels and synthesisers. "When Beechleaves are Falling" samples the voice of Hamstell Ridware's father singing with a massed RAF band in the 1930s.

Meanwhile "Balky Mule" takes a blues song by Blind Lemon Jefferson and adds electric guitars, saxophones and the obligatory organs to produce something new.

Faking It:

Sundae Club are not just a sampling collective, though. They are far more imaginative than that. Most of the time they try to avoid sampling, preferring, instead, to fake samples.

This is true of "Great Big Homburg Hats", which contains a narration about gangster life in the Second World War and "Stuff", which was recorded with the help of Dr C.D. Mille's mother, an actress.

With a Little Help from…:

Collaborations are what helps to make Sundae Club's music so good. As well as recruiting their own relatives (sometimes from beyond the grave!), HR and the Doctor use the actor Eric Shilling and local singer/musician Sam Holmes for their songs.

Sam Holmes writes the lyrics for the songs she sings with Sundae Club. "Angels in the Sky" and "A Different Tide" are both Holmes penned and bookend the album nicely with a soft balmy summer feeling.

Genre-less:

As with all good music, it is impossible to catagorise. Comparisons could be made to Lemon Jelly and The Real Tuesday Weld. But there are other references that could be made.

By their own admission, the Club's "Balky Mule" and other sample based tracks owe something to White Town's "Your Woman" which went from a teenager's bedroom straight to Number One some years ago.

Better than Vanilla Ice:

But the majority of Sundae Club's appeal lies in the fact that they sound like nothing you have ever heard before.

They are refreshing, new and innovative. Buy their album. Buy lots of copies of their album. Buy it in your droves. Just buy it. You'll thank me.

13/08/04 - First published on www.bbc.co.uk/gloucestershire on this link