Lucky Soul

Lucky Soul
The Great Unwanted
[Ruffa Lane; 2007]
Rating: 8.0

Ever since the Beach Boys' "Don't Worry Baby", guitar groups have set out to capture the teenage melodrama of 60s girl groups. Most recently, Britons the Pipettes broke hearts in matching costumes, while El Perro del Mar cried Swedish tears into orchestrally fluffed pillows. And don't forget Johnny Boy's "You Are the Generation That Bought More Shoes and You Get What You Deserve". Some bands add the Velvet Underground to the formula, whether in the sweet noise squall of the Jesus and Mary Chain or the Concretes' misty Mazzy Starscapes.

When I first encountered Lucky Soul, on last year's chic indie pop comp The Kids at the Club, all I could hear was the past. The London sextet's thrillingly overwrought girl-group glamor is completely unmediated by hipster weirdness; you'll find no Wes Anderson postmodernism on their debut album, The Great Unwanted, so you can leave your ironic T-shirts at home. The syrupy orchestration of "My Brittle Heart", the group's first single, takes from Phil Spector's "Wall of Sound" not the overly familiar drum patterns, but the grand, open-hearted directness, as huge and as potentially embarrassing as first love. "Liberty is wasted on me," sings frontwoman Ali Howard, cribbing a line from 1991 Morrissey B-side "I've Changed My Plea to Guilty". Another Lucky Soul single, "Lips Are Unhappy" remembers the Motown lesson on amplifying emotion by seeming to suppress it, as Howard calls for us to "shake, shake, shimmy, shimmy" (for sure!) over sunny-day tambourine and velveteen harmonies. "I'm tired of keeping composure when I'm not supposed to feel sad," she sings on "One Kiss Don't Make a Summer". The tracks of her tears are easy to trace.

Still, The Great Unwanted isn't the kind of album that leaves you walking out humming "Be My Baby". Guitarist, primary songwriter, and arranger Andrew Laidlaw pays more attention to composition than to homage, and Howard has an unshowy, girlish voice that's nevertheless more polished than usual in indie pop, with shades of Dusty Springfield, Sandie Shaw, and Petula Clark. She can cast a spell over upbeat Northern Soul floorshakers like "Getta Outta Town!" and bouncy third single "Add Your Light to Mine, Baby". But she's just as at home on decorous torch songs like guitar waltz "Baby I'm Broke", aching finale "The Last Song" (with its reviewer-ready "the penultimate beat of the drum") and the smoldering "My Darling, Anything", which pours sugar in the singer's wounds with musical puns about missed beats and a heart that goes "skip-skip-skip" like a scratched-up CD. It's the type of sumptuous bubblegum that made an impressive showing on Pitchfork's "The 200 Greatest Songs of the 1960s" but rarely places on year-end album lists.

On "The Great Unwanted", Lucky Soul decisively align themselves with the uncool, a not uncommon move that rings true mostly due to the music's non-appetite for winks. "Look for us, we were the casualties/ Forever paying the price for a life less boring," Howard proclaims. Elsewhere on the album, the toweringly embellished title track from recent EP Ain't Never Been Cool once again sides with the unfairly unloved. Which on one hand could be viewed as commercially astute; the latest girl-group revival can't last forever. Then again, that's where things get really poignant. Howard has chosen whole-broken-heartedly to stand among the pop-besotted, lonely souls to whom the Smiths addressed another B-side, 1985's "Rubber Ring"-- the huddled masses whose lives were once saved by a song. If we don't love her, who will?

-Marc Hogan, May 24, 2007