Hello Mate! / advantage Lucy [1998]
Anderson / advantage Lucy [2005]
I posted on this group a few days ago, but there are two more songs that need listening.
In particular, the first four seconds of "Hello Mate!" deserve attention. It's the perfect intro—just a simple baseline that I'm sure has been used before, but it creates so much anticipation, is so confident, so sure that what follows will be fun, that it should be required study material for indie-pop songwriters from now until the end of time.
Fortunately, that's not all this Lucy's got going on. Like most of the band's 10-year catalogue, "Hello Mate!" and the latest single, "Anderson," are sprinkled with horns, breaks, and sound changes in all the right spots. Just when you begin to wonder how a song will keep you interested for another full minute, they switch things up. "Get out of my head!" you scream. But they're already far away by then.
Also: Many thanks to Colin's friend Jon Rubin who wrote about WPNOB last week at his ubiquit.us blog, which thoughtfully analyzes everything from shitty music sites to politics to quantum telecloning. Quantum telecloning, now there's something even William Shatner can get behind.
aL's AMG Bio.
March 5, 2006
Further Advantages
February 24, 2006
The Other Best Party Ever
Solaris / advantage Lucy [1999]
朱い夏 / advantage Lucy [2005]
The cover of Fanfare (1999) to the left reminds me of The Best Party Ever (2005). And like The Boy Least Likely To, advantage Lucy has a deceptively juvenile sound. They are named in honor of Lucy Van Pelt of Peanuts fame after all.
This Lucy, however, doesn't just flirt around a piano. On "Solaris," the female vocalist, Aiko, sings, "Let's go for the Milky Way!" as the drums pound and the trumpets blast off. The guitarist even tosses in a mock countdown. It's their least subtle track, but the boisterousness doesn't hide the fact that this veteran group can compete with the best of its younger European counterparts, like Sambassadeur and The Concretes.
"朱い夏 (Vermilion Summer)" is more like a slow ascent in a hot-air balloon. Who needs a rocketship when there's no particular destination? Who needs real words—Japanese, English, or otherwise—when we've got aL singing "La, la, la" like this?
MORE advantage Lucy here.
aL's AMG Bio.
