JIM CARROLLreviews Lissie Trullie and more

Lissy Trullie: fast learner

Time to go back to the future. When you come across Lissy Trullie, you may well think you're suffering from flashbacks. In your mind, Blondie and The Pretenders are duking it out for the top spot, with Tom Verlaine and (the other) Jim Carroll looking on and everything is very leather- jacket cool. If only CBGBs was still in business and there were bums roaming the Bowery.

But while the Washington DC native may be in thrall to that era when a certain stretch of her adopted home in New York City was paved with hipster gold, she's no mere throwback. Dig out Trullie's Self-Taught Learner EP and get wise to her snappy, flirty, chic downtown pop. Be it her own Boy Boy, a song that has "hit" all over it, or how she reworks Hot Chip's Ready for the Floor, Trullie really does have game.

Yeah, it’s amazing how far you’ll get with a bit of sass, a snarl and a pout.

The one-time art student and model can count on a rake of interesting connections to get in the door, but having Mark Ronson on your speed-dial or Courtney Love bugging the hell out of you on MySpace can only go so far.

Trullie seems to have clocked that as well, and has concentrated on turning out more elegantly scruffy tunes with hooks galore. Live, she’s also turned up the heat, with a band who know all the right off-the-shoulder power-pop shapes to throw and notes to play.

Trullie is now set up with the Wichita label, which will release Self-Taught Learner in Europe next month. Expect to see and hear a lot more of her in the coming days.

[ www.myspace.com/Opens in new window ]

The Postelles: shake it up

They don't make songs like 123 Stopany more. It shimmies, shakes, rattles and rolls its way across the floor and, by the time you've clocked what is going on, you're smitten and wandering around in its slipstream.

123 Stopis just one of a whole clutch of sonic bobby- dazzlers from these young New Yorkers. There's been just one EP to date, and that Retone release has six songs that meld classic 1960s melodic pop with 21st-century attitude.

The word from The Postelles' live shows (they breezed in and out of Austin for last month's SXSW new band beano) is that you will twist and shout with delight. No wonder Capitol Records made with the chequebook action so fast and snapped them up.

It probably doesn't come as a surprise, either, that fellow New York indie-popster Albert Hammond Jr is an admirer, or that The Strokes' guitarist has produced the band. He, no doubt, is looking at The Postelles and seeing the next wave of buzzy, high-kicking indie-pop.

www.myspace.com/thepostelles

Four more

Rural Alberta Advantage
www.theraa.com
Songs about summer in the Rockies and winter on the farm from a three-piece doing the indiefolk
thing with vim and energy.

She Keeps Bees
www.myspace.com/
she keepsbeesJessica Larrabee's new Nests album is the business for
tough-as-a-nut bluesy indie rock.

Enemies
www.myspace.com/
enemiestheband
Smashing post-rock from Wicklow  band with a new single ( Bits of Parrots/Feed Me Seedless) and will be touring Japan in June.

Theophilus London
www.myspace.com/londonwave
Brooklyn MC with a fine line in electro-rap. Plays Cork's Pavilion tonight and Dublin's Twisted
Pepper tomorrow.