The first release for New Zealand jukebox-pop revisionists The Brunettes
was a seven-inch single called "Mars Loves Venus," the song — and the
band at the time — telling the tale of Brunettes co-conspirators
Jonathan Bree and Heather Mansfield, their lovin' love-in happily
casting them as some sort of new-millennial Phil and Ronnie. Six years
later, they borrow the same title, and that title song, for their second
longplayer; but with so much water under the bridge, here they evoke the
same phrase with an entirely different intent. The first time around,
when Bree and Mansfield were singing bubblegum jukebox odes with stars
in their eyes, the fluttering eyelids didn't lie; the clashing lashes were
merely flutterings mirroring the dum-dum-diddy of their fast-beating
hearts. By their debut disc, with this main couple having gone their
separate ways off the court, the back-and-forth boy/girl exchanges had
taken on a different quality, either reflecting their relationship
at that stage, or playing out the kind of relationships these producers
and their ingénues had back in the girl-group day, or, even, playing the
naövete of the past against the cynicism of the present. On that first
album, Holding Hands, Feeding Ducks, Mansfield maintained the cutesy-pie
girl-group spirit in her singing, whilst Bree acted more disaffected and
detached, standing back at an all-knowing distance and taking a snide
tone that, within the songs, went over the girl-with-the-curl's head.
For their second album, they've borrowed the title of that first single,
although, with this Mars Loves Venus, it's obvious how times have
changed — wholly from those salad days, sure, but even greatly from that
first-up longplayer.
Here, the female voice is brought forward into the (post-) modern day,
talking from an empowered now of self-help speak (hence the Mars and
Venus of the title) and girl-power catchphrases. So, then, when, in
"Leonard Says," when the girl tries to cheer her depressed boy, her
perkiness isn't devoted and eternal, responding to his day-to-day
despondence ("I sure don't want to be 30-something and work in a
record store... paranoid I'm just getting bitter and old") with a
defined, quietly defiant stand: "Please don't scare me like that ever
again/ I won't be an audience for you self-oppression/ And if you wanna be
my lover/ You've gotta get with my friends." True to such, when Bree
takes on a teasing tone, here, he gets an immediate reaction. "These
Things Take Time" begins with Mansfield honking out some rudimentary
clarinet, which leads to the boy/girl lyrical swapping "These things
take time, like learning the clarinet/'You know I'm trying but I'm so
impatient'/ It's getting better, week by week you hardly ever
squeak/ 'Yeaaaahhh, whatever!'" Later, "Your Heart Dies" finds his "not
everyone's lawn gets mowed twice a week" met by an aggressive "what's
that supposed to mean?" from her. It's that same song that finds them
happily recalling their relationship (together, in harmony) as "Once
you were a trophy for me/ As luck would have it, I, a trophy for you":
taking that old-fashioned convention of the smart guy with the pretty
wife and twisting it to fit modern social conventions, the smart people
who're just as swayed by prettiness, finding mutual trophy-wife-isms in
each other. At that point of the song — the closing track on this
disc — all suddenly stops; and, in the silence, Mansfield whispers, in
her New Zealand accent (which counters the deliberate faux-Americanism
of Bree's crooning), "It's unavoidable, it just happens; when you grow
up, your heart dies."
So, yes, whilst The Brunettes spend so much of their time evoking the
'60s — as viewed through the prism of Shadow Morton's teenaged pop-song
soap-operas — they did come of age in the '80s, and echoing one of the
signature lines from John Hughes's teenaged motion-picture soap-opera
"The Breakfast Club" shows that much. Placed in this context, its
sentiments go hand in hand with the ideas of struggling to grow up, and
cultivating nostalgia for one's youth that were addressed in "Leonard
Says" (these two of the many songs on the album to evoke the "movies" in
some form). Taken, as whole, it seems to speak of Bree's discomfort at
making eternally-youthful music when he himself is aging. Having lived
the rock-'n'-roll teenaged-rebellion life, starting the first
rarely-spoken-of incarnation of The Brunettes when he was 14, Bree now
finds himself, at 25, drifting away from an age where he can
legitimately identify with teenaged soap-operas. That the Brunettes
have been able to grow to take in all of these growing-up feelings
speaks volumes of their take on pop music, the combo less a novelty act
than an exploration of the then-and-now of popular song, the
then-and-now of the songwriter's life, and the then-and-now of the
songwriters' entwined lives.
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