Sweetly beautiful three-part harmonies underpin darkly ironic humour and deliciously unfolding, oddly disturbing lyrics in this entertaining debut by the Melbourne former high school friends Heide Peverelle ((they/them), Jeanie Pilkington and Gracie Sinclair. Their oeuvre takes in the gentler acoustic guitar and minimalistic end of the folk genre, but lyrics, often sharply explicit, will have the listener making double takes about daydreams and galling breakups, sexual fantasies and media overload, and all the petty resentments and minor humiliations of being in your early twenties in the 2020s. Their joint harmonies are as wonderfully controlled and balanced as their songs lightly twisted and mischievous. Standouts include opener God’s A Different Sword, then The Actor (“What could you say to make this right?/ Afternoon fuck and then a fight/ You knew that I was listening/ Your new man in the kitchen”); the vulnerable yet menacing Cathode Ray (“We get home, get the scalpel out/ And just for fun/ You say, show me what it looks like/ When you come undone”); the hallucinatory feel of the violin and theme of unrequited love theme of a standout, the darkly poetic Moth Song (“Open doors and out they pour / A thousand paper bag/ Coloured anti-gravity/ Pieces of confetti fill my sky / I see twin birds when I think of you most times/ And opals fill my eyes/ I guess I wanted more from/ What I saw”; and the deliciously still fireside-feel of closer Mary’s Playing The Harp. A beautifully potent combination of the sublime musical sweetness, sometimes akin to First Aid Kit, but and bloody bitterness of lyric in this very strong debut. Out on Jagjaguar.
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