"I miss my coochie coo/ Now I'm boo hoo blue" is poetry any way you
take it, and sweet-tooth'd New Zealand sweethearts The Brunettes show
themselves as authentically unironic authors of such way-cute
couplets on their debut disc Holding Hands, Feeding Ducks and
its six-song follow-up The Boyracer EP. Both of which find the
Kiwi combo indulging in authentic analogist tone and boy/girl vocal
interplay and rampant backing-vox/handclaps and all kinds of lyrics
of such sly intent — such indulgences the kind that give
indulging a good name. With gear bought from a King Loser garage
sale, a record collection filled with, like, Nancy & Lee and Honeys
albums (or something), and an affection for the lovers-in-love-yeah
clichés that ran rife in the jukeboxes of yore, The Brunettes
are one of the few combos of recent days harking back to past days
that actually rise above the lazy ways of the pop-cultural pastiche.
Rather than smarmy post-modern condescension for the times and tone
they evoke, The Brunettes have an earnest love; and, as fun and funny
as they are, they're not joking around by showing it. They take this
silly '60s-styled gear really seriously, it seems, it not being just
some fashion thing, a dressed-up dressing serving as front to a band
that doesn't care. No, boy, they do it from their hearts, with said
organs all giddy with that dum-dum-diddy, their sophisticated
displaying of sophisticated boom-boom so damn good I fear I'm doing a
bad job of relating the extent of its goodness in relayed syntax,
with the comedy and the artistry and the sincerity and the quality
and the melody of this gear hard to wrangle into rock-reviewer's
syntax.
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