A fairytale story of a debut for the Los Angeles six-piece fronted by Ethan Ramon, who cold-emailed demos to Rough Trade Records heads Geoff Travis and Jeannette Lee before even playing a live gig and were signed – with that instinctive leap of faith rewarded by this stylish, bold, mercurial, confident, darkly humorous, eclectic debut leaping between rock, indie, pop, hoedown country, delta blues and beyond. The title track, Ramon describes, is about “the worst person you know yelling at God to give them a sign that they are good. In a deliberately unserious way, we want the song to prompt the same question that the album raises, which is - if you are a good person for the wrong reasons, does that detract from your goodness?” That evil, deluded narrator seems topical subject given the current state of American politics, the title track meanwhile stylishly leaping between a catchy, passionate flamenco guitar, Latin rhythms and shades of the peak 2000s Strokes. Sweetiepie brings in jaw harp, nimble guitar solos and in stomping vocal harmony country hoedown. With another stylistic mischief, the opener The Dog Dies In The End, from the perspective of someone who hates his neighbours’ dogs, traverses between some theatrical, waltz-time Kurt Weill-style opera number and full-throated rock. Sweat, with its ironic, presenter-intro video, is a gentle, thrumming indie-pop number with Ramon moving between the tender, droll, then exploding passionate high-octane vocals. There’s a tangible talent on show for enjoying and also parodying genres, with a stop-start mischief, as well as gloriously engaging melodies. That is also exemplified in several other tracks from the ironic, manipulative indie-rock of Death In The Family (“I need a death in the family to shift the plot / I need some people to forget all their forget-me-nots”) the darkly vivid House (“My house is built on someone's tomb / And every ghost you see looks like it's seen a ghost”), talky intros such as on A Sympathetic Person, the bluesy, fast-talking, witty They Told Me Jump, I Said How High (the vocal delivery of which which has some echoes of United States of Whatever by Liam Lynch) or the singalong, falsetto teenage indie angst of closer I’m Your Fiend (“I wrote your name / On my bedroom wall / I dotted all the I's with hearts / Put on some Joy Division / Give myself a bruise / This love is tearing me apart.”) A boldly playful band full of musical and lyrical trickery as well as no shortage of musical skill in this wonderfully fun, unpredictable debut, all signalling further creativity and further surprises in the future. Out on Rough Trade Records.
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