EGG RECORDS 23rd Feb 2018
There is something rather wonderful about The Lovely Eggs. I don’t know what the most significant factor is – the flat Lancashire vowels, the quirky songs, or the pure pop energy. It is almost too simple but the raw energy makes this a feral force of nature. The band dug up Dave Fridmann’s number on the internet and left an answerphone message asking him to produce. A year later, he called and, despite being beloved of psychedelic bands (Mercury Rev, Flaming Lips), he had looked up their music and wanted to give it a go. The result is a full and rich album despite remaining true to it’s very direct core. I mean, the closing track is the very sarky Would You Fuck.
The album opener Hello, I Am Your Sun is a good place to start – It has all the factors, allied with a wiggy psychedelic phasing effect and silly treated vocals. It bursts with happiness and excitement. But then things get even better with the next track, single Wiggy Giggy, a paean to their home, with a wiggy giggy backdrop and soaring chorus and verse. The fuzzed-up guitar carries the simple tune into fuzzy pop heaven. Dickhead has a Glam Rock shape to the intro but is rapidly an angry and healthy punk thrash. It’s all good but let’s skip forward to the almost nursery-rhyme singsong of Big Sea. Keyboard arpeggios take the chorus into somewhere special, while the lyrics have a picture-book sense of wonder. Perhaps it helps that the couple have a three year old for perspective on the world.
As a boy / girl duo, it doesn’t get simpler. Holly Ross plays guitar and David Blackwell plays drums. The guitar has some effects to make for plenty of low range and studio wizardry has added some keyboards to the mix but, beyond that, it is simple and raw. With what looks like a great live show (on the evidence of YouTube), this polishes up a little but leaves it straightforward. A pop sensibility is at work here, filtered through a lo-fi indie sensibility and conjuring up something quintessimally indie and Northern. Lancaster is a strange place, the place where the Pendle Witches were hanged and tucked away between the hills and the sea. Holly explains; “Living up here in Lancaster is kind of mad. It’s a bit like the Twin Peaks of Great Britain. Not much goes on up here and there’s not much to do so it’s kind of like living in space. But we like being cosmonauts!”
Punky, buzzy, fuzzy, sarky, stuffed with attitude AND cosmic wonder. This is the breakthrough album for this cult duo.