Quick Spins: Darlings, Kleerup, Penelope[s],
By Tankboy in Arts & Entertainment on Sep 2, 2009 7:40PM
In which we take a quick look at a few recent musical releases.
It doesn't take long to win us over, and New York's Darlings grabbed us with the first 20 seconds of their debut Yeah I Know, and didn't let go for the rest of that album's 29 minutes. The quartet's songs are recorded on what sounds like an ancient 8-track, and are infused with the cathciest melodies Guided By Voices and teenage Fanclub would have written had the two ever joined forces. The whole affair has a distinctly late '80s indie British feel with the same elasticity we always appreciated about that scene. Darlings take two to three minutes of your life at a time, inject it with scrappy beauty, and leave you breathlessly jonesing for the next hit. We'd describe the gauxzy air around the songs as hallucinatory if the group wasn't so amazingly precise in everything they do under that haze. Get this album now while we still have a few last rays of summer to bathe in while listening to it.
MP3: Darlings "Teenage Girl"
MP3: Darlings "If This Is Love"
Kleerup's self-titled album is cartoonishly anthemic yet unrelenting in its hold on you. While the disc came out in Europe last year it has only recently landing in the States, with a slightly different track list, and while we doubt it's going to publicly grow into the monolith that its sound would indicate. Opening track "Hero" pretty much sets out Kleerup's mission statement, with walls of synths and the sort of soaring melody and relentless beat that could power a million dream sequences featuring soaring dragons or galloping unicorns ... or unicorns riding dragons! When he pairs with singers like Lykke Li or Robyn they help to ground his ambitions and wrap them in something tangible and affecting, but when he's left to his own proclivities the results tend to be a tad too much. This doesn't mean we don't like the album, it just means that we tend to blast it at top volume in the privacy of our own home instead of slipping its tunes into our DJ sets. Take that as you will.
Penelope[s]
Priceless Concrete Echoes
Penelope[s]' Priceless Concrete Echoes opens strongly enough with a tune that could very well be an outtake from the last Cut Copy album. But that opening betrays the band's biggest weakness; they are utterly and completely unable to create anything that is even vaguely their own. The disc's returns diminish as it plays on and plunders ever more vapid strains of '80s synth pop before finally impaling itself on its inexplicable and lifeless cover of, brace yourself, The Beastie Boys' "Sabotage," going so far as to sample the tune's original opening sequencing before slipping into Penelope[s] own turgid rendition of the rest of the song. The funny thing is that a couple of the songs would make decent singles of the electropop fluff variety -- "Stuck In Lalaland," and "Licked By Love" are stand-outs -- but we don't think Penelope[s] had enough material to justify an entire album.