Corner Laughers
(Popover Corps)
Smart, bubbly pop from two girls who have been pals since high school, The Corner Laughers' Ultraviolet Garden cuts studs its sugary hooks with quiz bowl vocabulary and surreal imagery. The tunes are airy, breezy and laced with unexpected lyrical twists as Karla Kane sings and plays ukulele here, while long-time pal, Angela Silletto slings a melodic Mersey inflected guitar. Their second album, produced by the Orange Peels' Alan Clapp, puts a 1960s sheen onto conflicted, ebullient and intricately intelligent girl pop.
Many of these guitar-chiming, tambourine clanking tunes are about men. In fact, the best cuts cock a jaundiced eye at domesticity, employing the voice of girls too sharp to settle but fascinated anyway by the clichés of romance. Honeymoons in Mexico? Try "Yellow Jacket". Staying together for the kiddies? Check "For the Sake of the Cat." Breaking up? There's "The Commonest Manifesto". Late night calls to an ex (whose new girl answers)? "Silver Medal" has a surprisingly fresh take. All these songs are bright, sardonic, and without a trace of self pity, bouncing along on unstoppable beats and irresistible girls-rule harmonies. "Guys who are jerks" songs are interspersed with cuts that tackle odder, more idiosyncratic subjects - medieval holy men, deceased mobsters and the end of the world. "Shrine of the Martyred Saint" has some of the Decemberists' willful celebration of anachronism, while gorgeous, trippy "Dead Sicilians" drifts and echoes like Wayward Bus-era Magnetic Fields. End of days cut "Space Echo", though, is the album's prettiest and most expansive cut, finishing off both the world and the album in sweet but vaguely unsettling style.
Consumer Note: Ultraviolet Garden is the first "official" release on John Wesley Harding's Popover Corps label, not counting, of course, JWH's most recent album Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead. You can learn all about the Corner Laughers' esteemed patron and their (slightly dubious) labelmates elsewhere on the Blurt site (check the links) and at the Popover site.
Standout Tracks: "Space Echo" "The Commonest Manifesto" "Dead Sicilians" JENNIFER KELLY
