The Route One approach works – there may be merit to music being complex and multi-layered, but there are other times when nothing but the most straightforward material will do. It often has much more impact, too – just ask Fast Years [Twitter/Facebook]. To put it bluntly, the Brooklyn band don’t fuck about. They’ve only been on the scene for a short while after forming last year, but they’ve been making a name for themselves with some of the most thrillingly direct indie-pop that I’ve heard all year. Their six-song debut EP is wonderfully consistent, but it still only hints at what could still be to come.
It opens with a brace of familiar songs; we’ve featured Young Heart and Let Me Try on here before), but the older material, full of effervescent hooks, surf-pop infectiousness and 24-carat golden choruses, is refreshed by the new context into which it’s been placed. The lyrics are as easy to relate to as they’ve ever been (‘You’ve a got a young heart, you’re afraid to break it’), and each of these songs is part of a wider story. Impressively enough, it’s the newer songs that are even more worthy of note, proving that the quartet aren’t just a band that are set to burn bright and fade away – the fading away doesn’t even come into the equation.
The first of the new songs is introduced by a thudding bass drum, a chiming guitar line and some steady bass: it’s a song that is very easy to, well, fall for; it’s called Fall For Me and is, at the time of writing, my favourite song on the EP. It shows, more than any other song across Women‘s 16 minutes, what the band are truly acapable up. The bar’s set quite high by it, and even if the remaining three songs don’t quite match it, they still come quite close.
Like It Or Not comes equipped with an irresistible melody and a vocal line that easily gets into the listener’s head, while Stolen Love hints at the darker and bluesier side of the band’s output, combining a powerful riff with reflective lyrics to great effect. Happy Hour closes the EP with an extremely catchy vocal hook and and another impressive chorus. Melodically speaking, the EP is pretty much perfect from start to finish. Women may be rather straightforward, but sometimes the best things in life are the simplest, and this is very much the case with Fast Years.
Women is released next week.