The debut album from local lads The Stevens is a big pile of snappy songs that collapse into each together, making you feel like you’re stumbling from obstacle to obstacle in a messy room full of hidden treasures. Written over two different line-ups, mixing bedroom recordings with studio productions and criss-crossing between two lead vocalists/songwriters, A History Of Hygiene has the feel of an anthology. For all of its nods to the past (particularly music from NZ’s Flying Nun label), it sounds like the start of something new and exciting.
A highlight of a recent New Centre of the Universe compilation, Elpho Beach is a good example of this collection’s mass of breezy but troubled tunes. With lyrics like “Your daughter’s on her cellphone/Your grandma’s eating ice-cream cones”, it nostalgically recalls an Antipodean summer holiday, despite its Americanisms and anachronisms. Other highlights include the slacker romance of The Long Vacation (“I was lying next to you/We were sleeping with the TV on”), the nervous social phobias of Scared Of Other Men, and the compact, GBV-like pop of Travelator and True Tales Of Half Time.
The shortness of the two dozen songs and the way they interrupt each other means that as soon as you latch onto one song’s melody, the rug gets pulled from beneath your feet well before there’s a chance for another verse and chorus. Thankfully, the track that replaces it is always an equally good tune, so it’s best just to sit, or perhaps lie, back and let it all wash over you. A History Of Hygiene could be filed under ‘jangle dolewave scratchy slacker pop’, but ‘great music’ would be a more fitting category.
BY CHRIS GIRDLER
Best Track: Skeleton vs Silicon
If You Like These, You’ll Like This: Bee Thousand GUIDED BY VOICES, Vehicle THE CLEAN, New Start Again DICK DIVER
In A Word: Summery
