Smittens - Love Record Breaker

  by Dave Goodwin

published: 12 / 7 / 2014

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Review

After reading the press notes which said this album consisted of whores , dead pets, not wanting to live and explicit lyrics about certain in-roads in to politics, I was darkly interested. Then I did some digging and found out that in their own words the Smittens are "a hard-working globe-trotting independent American twee pop band from Burlington, Vermont who like to think of themselves as friends first and open-hearted indiepop revolutionaries after that." Max Andrucki, Missy Bly, Colin Clary, Dana Kaplan, Holly Chagno, and David Zacharis switch instruments, write political style ditties and sing to create brilliantly lyrical and hyper-catchy pop songs of all shapes and sizes. They cite their interests as bicycles, roller skates and you, and also like Field Mice, Darren Hanlon, Tullycraft, Dear Nora, Zombies, Archies, Tommy Roe, Magnetic Fields, My Favorite, Barcelona and ABBA. Recorded by the band themselves and mixed by Gary Olsen at Marleborough Farm in Brooklyn, this is a curious little affair really. The band themselves flit their time between Philadelphia and New York, and allegedly combine Scandinavian queerness with Moog Synths. They offer this set in lovely 10" vinyl with different sleeve designs and the inevitable download. As I said, I was expecting some sordid heavy stuff here and I was slightly disappointed when it didn't happen. I didn't stay disappointed for long though. When the ditties kicked in and the twee shone out and then the melodies came, I found myself smiling a lot, especially when middle song 'These days' and then the brilliant title track drifted in. Then I stuck it on again and listened to the storytelling and music, and found it was quite funny and naughty in places with some rather explicit lyrics hidden behind the twee. 'These Lips' has reference to going down on all fours. This is different to a lot of the stuff out there, and there is nothing really to compare the Smittens with which is good in itself, so you just have to let you hair down a bit if you have some and listen to the simple sounds, chuckle at the naughty lyrics, pour yourself a dry martini and morph into a whore. Marvellous!

Track Listing:-

1 Upper West Side
2 Pants On Fire
3 Closer to Fine
4 These Days
5 Love Record Breaker
6 Love Record Breaker
7 Almost
8 These Days (Johen Rafael Tilli Remi

Band Links:-

https://www.facebook.com/thesmittens
http://www.smittens.com/
https://twitter.com/thesmittens

Label Links:-

http://fikarecordings.com/
https://www.facebook.com/fikarecording
https://twitter.com/fikarecordings
http://www.last.fm/label/Fika+Recordin
https://www.youtube.com/user/fikarecor