Thursday afternoon may not be an appropriate time for rocking out, but you won’t be able to help yourself whilst listening to this. It’s a song from the Philadelphia-based band The Smiling Lies [Twitter/Facebook]. If you have heard of them before, it may be because they used to be called The Van Goghs. Obviously, that didn’t get too far, but their driving, melodic rock, which is given a further boost by its lo-fi production (which suits the nature of the music perfectly), sounds good by any name. You can check out Space Elevator below; if it ends up doing it for you (and we’re quite sure it will), you can have it for free. It’s taken from mini-album Say Yes?, which was released as a download last year, and is rather good. In fact, if you’re looking for more, we’ve thrown in another song, the similarly excellent Tonight. If your day needs brightening up, try some Smiling Lies, as they’ll do the job quite well.
I had an interesting, albeit brief, Twitter conversation earlier in the week, in which someone raised the point that ‘too many mistake seriousness in pop for intelligence and fun for stupidity.’ It was in relation to a simple yet astonishingly effective recently-released album, but those words could apply just as easily to the new album from Scottish math-pop types Tango in the Attic [Twitter/Facebook], which manages to balance intelligence and fun extremely well, and throw in a metric ton of brilliant hooks while it’s at it.
It’s an extremely busy-sounding album, too: there’s a lot going on in each of the album’s nine tracks, and though it would be easy to say that everything else involved in the propulsive opener Stitch is drowned out by some prominent riffing, its euphoric hooks mask the fact that the band have unpredictable indie-pop down to a fine art. These are the sort of songs which, once you feel you’ve gotten a handle on them, immediately veer off into another direction. The same can certainly be said of recent single Mona Lisa Overdrive, which waits until it can be pigeonholed before spinning off into something else entirely.
In the context of the album, that song sounds almost straightforward, but it is songs like Paw Prints and the Animal Collective-esque 198 Alpaca (the latter of which makes use of an impressively complex time signature, as well as similarly impressive drumming from Paul Johnson) that give a better indication of Tango in the Attic’s new sound, a mixture of lo-fi, garage and any number of other things. They don’t feel like being boxed into any particular genre, and this sort of restlessness is reflected in the way the album is structured: a lot of the songs flow into each other, making for quite a cohesive listening experience.
It would be easy to call Sellotape a front-loaded album, and it certainly doesn’t help that the first four songs are some of the best material the quintet have written so far, but, quite ironically, the album doesn’t properly hit its stride until Suncream, the song which brings the band’s forward-thinking style to the fore and wreaks havoc upon conventional song structure; at the same time, the album’s genesis lies in pop music, and this is no more apparent than on penultimate track Swimming Pool, a wonderfully danceable song which also spends half its time in a 7/8 meter – odd time signatures and danceable music can certainly go together, though anyone wanting to strut their stuff to much of the material on this album had better come up with a new set of moves. Sellotape is that rarest of albums which proves that even though intelligence and fun can be hard to come by in the same pop song, they can certainly co-exist, because this is one of the most enjoyable albums you’ll hear all year.
Sellotape is released on May 28th via Domicile Crocodiles.
Fun fact: I have never attempted to tango, much less in an attic. I can’t, and more importantly, won’t dance, but I imagine doing something like that in such a confined space would be a whole lot of fun. It is fitting, then, that the new single from Scottish troupe Tango in the Attic, should be so raucous. It is the sort of punchy, melodic garage-pop that’s seemingly irresistible, but even though it would have been easy to rite a song with ramshackle charm scrawled over it, the quartet’s Mona Lisa Overdrive is tight-knit and musically accomplished, hearkening back somewhat to the math-rock influences that were audible in earlier material. It is straightforward, yet not afraid to throw in a twist or two; you would expect it to follow a verse-chorus-verse route, but an unexpected, yet no less energetic, riff-driven coda kicks in around the two-minute mark. Mona Lisa Overdrive is the second single (following the March release of Paw Prints) to be taken from their sure-to-be-excellent second album, which is entitled Sellotape and arrives on May 28th. If it’s as consistent as its singles suggest, then it should prove easy to become attached to.
