The humble cassette is the most derided of formats. Sure, it doesn’t sound as good as CD and certainly doesn’t have the warm fuzz associated with vinyl but as objects go, it’s just so darn cute! This dinky cassette collects together some of Scotland’s top underground (and unsigned) talent. Bringing to mind the cult US punk label SST (many of whose releases were cassette-only, fact fans), this album is an ambitious release. Extremely eclectic, avant metallers Take A Worm For A Walk Week shake hands with the Jeff Buckley-isms of Hijak Oscar. It would be useless to catalogue all the acts on here, given their varied genre and location, but it’s safe to say that most of these won’t be household names in anyone’s home (except perhaps their own). A few favourites then: Juliet Kilo’s savage rock will tear the hair off your head, so stock up on wigs. Twin Atlantic sound like an indie band who have swapped ’Skins’ for ’River City’, whilst This July look set to make this a summer to remember. A genuine curiosity, this may well become the best compilation of Scottish talent to be collected recently - the sort of thing the word ’seminal’ was coined for.

//Robin Murray