Album Review: The Softlightes - Say No! to Being Cool. Say Yes to Being Happy
December 9th 2007 11:02
Glaswegian pop/rock poppets Franz Ferdinand once quipped that their musical mission statement was to craft songs which girls could dance to. The Softlightes have considerably upped the ante with their quirky brand of indie pop/rock that guarantees to get even the most disillusioned of scenesters moving.
It seems that the anti-cool is the new cool and the anti anti-hero has emerged as the latest proponent of indie pop/rock. Or so the Softlightes would have us believe. Despite their annoying penchant for superfluous punctuation and trite platitudes parading as bloated album titles these offbeat indie pop rockers have delivered something incredibly refreshing with their first effort Say No! to Being Cool. Say Yes to Being Happy.
They espouse their overtly saccharine brand of indie pop with such an unabashed fervour it is immediately compelling. It’s in part due to their naïve indie pop aesthetic as well as their knack for constructing simple melodies and overlapping them warm, jaunty harmonies. Theirs is a sugar coated feel good music that evokes the hackneyed images of fluffy white kittens, brilliant rainbows and dazzling rays of sunshine - and it leaves you feeling more than a little bit guilty for enjoying it. It’s a sonic sedative, a healthy dose of valium for your ears, yet in the hands of lesser musicians this album would have been left wanting. However, The Softlightes have deftly manage to infuse their songs with enough of their idiosyncratic quirkiness to temper the rather cloying moments.
It’s precisely this feeling of off kilter, left of centre naive pop that permeates the album and emerges as its recurrent leitmotif. It’s there in the instinctive simplicity of The Ballad of Theo and June and Heart Made of Sound both with their cantering melodies and uplifting vocals as well as the electro pop of Girlkillsbear (of which the Lo-Fi Fnk remix is worth seeking) with its beeps and bleeps and warm, unadorned harmonies that help tp firmly entrench the song into your heart. Even the dancey, guitar driven The Robots in My Bedroom Were Playing Arena Rock, which features a vocoder used to within an inch of its life, is a modest yet mellifluous construction.
Their shtick is an optimistic simplicity which they execute quite well. ‘Sometimes things change and I do too’ vocalist Ron Fountenberry intones amidst the loping melody of A Town Named Blue as if the world operates in such a simple way. In the world of the Softlightes maybe it does. The soft susurration and ethereal harmonies make it an optimistic break up song that strays from the typically maudlin prototypes we’ve come to know. Even Untitled Duet #3 with its breathy vocal and ambling melody makes unrequited love seem like such a pleasant excursion.
At times the lyrics are rather mawkish and can come across as awkward and clumsy. It seems that Fountenberry uses his words more for the way they sound than for what they mean. They verge from the rather droll proclamation of ‘I’ll drip like a sink’ on The Ballad of Theo and June to the delightfully kooky The Microwave song, “I’m just a microwave” he incessantly murmurs in his dreamy vocal.
Sometimes the thought of listening to another emotionally effusive ballad is enough to have me climbing the walls. There’s only so much despair and melancholia that these wearied ears can take. Perhaps the reason the Softlightes succeed with their engaging brand of offbeat indie pop is that there is none of the world wearied cynicism that permeates so much of the indie world’s offerings.
Yes, the music may be overtly cutesy and saccharine, perhaps even cloying enough to give you cavities, but therein lies their appeal. Listening to the album is akin to eating your way through a mountain of fairy floss and chasing it with a valium or twelve. It’s an enormous candy just begging to be devoured - and I want to lean over and take a bite. Just a little one though, this one’s a keeper, aching molars and all.
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