Immaculate Machine’s High on Jackson Hill is good, clean, uncompromising fun. Dressed in your Sunday best and sitting around the dining table, you could play this CD to your folks, granny, aunty Doris and the kids, and it’s likely that they’ll all be nodding their heads and tapping their feet to the melodious ditties and catchy, punchy choruses – just as you will be. This is a very catchy album; it is syrupy, happy-clapping indie-pop at its sweetest. Perhaps not the most challenging or thought provoking album of 2009, but Immaculate Machine makes up for this by producing songs that are extremely accessible, and more than easy on the ear. High on Jackson Hill has all the markings of a great stereo-loving companion for those long-overdue summer months. It has the energy to fill the dance floor at your local indie club, and to encourage beer fuelled danceathons between like-minded popsters.

It juxtaposes crunchy, Arcade Fire-esque anthems with evocative floral-folk ballads, half reminiscent of an early Belle & Sebastien. With the band describing themselves as “being game,” and their music as “unselfconsciously enthusiastic,” it is clear that Immaculate Machine will play whatever they want to play, regardless of coolness, and it is this unabashed sense of defiance and cut-throat positivity that comes across so gleefully in High on Jackson Hill.