Post-Space Blues-Noise PopOvercasters had to have written a lot of its music on rainy days and in the gloom of winter. But that's what you do when you're in a band in a land with over three hundred days of sunshine a year. You grasp around you at whatever is outside the mundane of everyday existence and if that means working under the cloak of clouds and cold weather, so be it. However, this group isn't a bunch of mope-rockers who came late to the Manchester scene plunder party only to shy away from the precipice of Ian Curtis' tortured psyche on the way to the dance club. The melancholy you'll hear in the music isn't born of anguish and despair. Rather, it is the expression of a preference for deep emotional experiences even if they leave you shaken to the core. Beyond the indigo atmospherics, Overcasters are a rock and roll band. Its defiant spirit and sonic exuberance can be heard across the entirety of its latest album, The Whole Sea is Raging. At turns electrifying, hypnotic and transporting, that record is a great argument for why guitar-based rock isn't dead. Not when it possesses the power to inspire by inviting you into a world more exciting than your everyday life. Not when it is so seething with vitality it brings a quaver to singer Kurt Ottaway's voice. Overcasters make triumphant music for an era when many people feel like the downtrodden underdog and we're all the better for it. - Tom Murphy