This is a beautifully uncluttered album. Which isn’t to say it’s not messy. It is. It slouches too much, is torn, stained, trips over itself and is invariably a bruised victim of its own recklessness. But it is also brilliantly uncomplicated, lacking musical litter, surviving imaginatively on the fundamentals and their wits alone. And with that it follows in a fine line of similar boy/girl 2-pieces who couldn’t help but get to the point; The Kills, White Stripes, Royal Trux, Joy Zipper et al. It’s exactly like Wife Swap – Indie Edition, a tentative, cross-pollinated mix and match between Tabitha/Vinny and Hotel/VV specifically. And that’s got to give you chemistry worth capturing for posterity. Hell, if it went too well and they stayed swapped it would be no bad thing. But that’s by the by anyway, it’s not real. But thanks to Giant Drag, neither must it be part of an elaborate fantasy any longer.
There’s a warm passion on display here, a heads-out-the-window-innocence and understated lust for life pervading everything, like a warm syrup coating. This is actually at stark odds with the overall impression. You can give entire credit for that to Annie Hardy’s soft, longing and only slightly tainted vocal and her child-like zeal for melody, like she’s catching it with a butterfly net and an excited scream. And that jars spiritedly with the rough grunge-with-air-pockets slabs of riffery she hauls from her guitar. Not to mention the attitude/mischief with which they title and approach songs (‘Kevin Is Gay’, ‘You’re Full Of Shit (Check Out My Sweet Riffs’, ‘My Dick Sux’). It’s like her caution boundaries have yet to be drawn up. And thanks to these juxtapositions no matter how heavy a song pertains to be, it tends to only ever feels as light as a cloud.
Micah Calabrese (the other half), incidentally, holds these songs down with some creatively unfussy drumming, truly becoming their heartbeat, attuned to every subtle nuance of which there are surprisingly many. He lurks practically out of sight in the beautiful Mazzy Star-esque ‘Cordial Invitation’ for instance, allowing Annie’s weave of delicate melody and counter-texture all the space it needs, whilst acting as the solid mechanical cornerstone of the PJ Harvey/Nirvana/Breeders 3-way ‘Yflmd’. ‘Smashing’, with its artistic air of trippy beats, maudlin loops and rain-cloud rough guitar shows them working together at perhaps their most effective, not that you can honestly knock anything on here. Certainly not the tenderly heartfelt, slacker anarchic unravelling of Chris Isaac’s ‘Wicked Game’ placed here as feel-good-and-maybe-tiny-bit-anguished album climax. Imagine The Kills and Joy Zipper as two pantomime horses. This is like getting 2 heads, and how is a 2-headed horse nor brilliant?