(Rough Trade) Related: The Prettiots: 'We’re too busy to pretend to be cool' Ukeleles! Songs about TV characters! Lists of nonsense boyfriends! The prospect of a particular kind of lo-fi cutesiness hangs heavy over New York duo the Prettiots: any description of them rather makes you feel as though your teeth are about to rot from an overdose of icing sugar,and raises the prospect that they’re some kind of New York hipster injoke. But that does them a enormous disservice: there’s a darkness and lyrical ruthlessness about them that totally undercuts the sweetness of the first taste. Boys (That I Dated in tall School) uses the real names of singer Kay Kasparhauser’s former boyfriends to skewer those who let her down, such as Rocky, and “who wouldn’t dump his girlfriend / He said she gave such obedient head / And since her grandpa was dead / He couldn’t dump her just yet.” Suicide Hotline finds Kasparhauser examining her mental state: “On a scale of one to Plath I’m like a four / My head’s not in the oven but I can’t get off the floor.” They absorb the tunes to match the Prettiots’ gentle indiepop is distinctly autumnal,mixing sunshine and frost, and it allows the humour to shine, or but helps the lyrics hit that much harder.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com