Having made myself some (instant) coffee and light refreshments in the form of tuna-on-toast, I settled down for the morning’s musical entertainment. The blister on my foot wasn’t helping the mood much and the awful drilling sound upstairs was complementing the awful drilling sound coming from my speakers. But that wasn’t Phema, that was someone else. More on Phema in a minute.

The coffee wasn’t particularly satisfying, so I made myself another cup and this time put sugar in. It tasted even worse. (The tuna-on-toast wasn’t too great either.) Why had this brand of cheap, instant coffee, which had been fine before, suddenly tasted so dull? Had I been subjecting myself to the cheap option when a more expensive one was bound to be a far more enjoyable experience?

I know what you’re thinking. “You’re going to compare Phema [told you we’d get to them in a minute] to your coffee, aren’t you?” Well no, actually I’m not, clever clogs. I just wanted to write about coffee. And on an entirely unrelated subject, I will now talk about pop music.

Hands up if you like Jimmy Eat World. Uhuh, good. Now hands up if you like Therapy?. Uhuh, good. Never really did like that noisy album they did, though, did you? You liked ‘Troublegum’. In that case you might like Phema, a band the words ‘Competent’, ‘Solid’, and ‘Rock’ were all created for. Now I know that makes them sound like some shite pub rock band, but they are not that. Phema have the dynamics and vocals of the aforementioned Jimmy Eat World, the riffary of the aforementioned Therapy?, and Power Chords R Us tendencies of the not-mentioned-until-now Feeder. That’s all very well and good but there’s still the sense that we’ve heard it all before and Phema are still searching for that X-factor which will make them stand out from the crowd. If I was running a (proper) record label and was looking for hot UK talent, then I’d probably have my eye on these guys.

You can probably buy/blag this from their website, so go have a look.