The Motorettes - I Am Blisters I Am EP (Kitchenware)
3/5
By: Christiana Spens
There's something so refreshing about a song that starts with handclaps and "This - is - a - love song," as opposed to jaded heartache, and a sound somewhere in between candy and robots - some kind of innocence like Lolita.
Something soda-pop is definitely going on with 'Make It But Make It Buzz'. I can't help being reminded of Courtney Love if she were a twenty-year-old boy, or Kurt with a lollipop. It's cute, it works, like OK Go, chemicals mixed with cinnamon, all that yearning slurring and a base line that pouts. I don't think there are many words with more than one syllable, and in the rare case that there are two syllables, the word is cut in half to conform with the staccato.
It reminds me of the cheerleaders in my high school in Memphis actually, the way they bent over suggestively at every rhyme and waved their pom-poms to suggest they were wild deep, deep, down, only they couldn't quite show it because they had to conform to the rhyme and rhythm of the cheer, not to mention school rules. Likewise (though with much more originality and art I must say) The Motorettes create a tension that draws and pulls by putting their music into child-like rhythm and realising teenage dreams, so hard to beat. It has all the youthful chutzpah of The Clash, The Police and then that All-American play of Weezer and the Offspring, except more mellow at core. In its faux-jadedness I can hear the Strokes strumming their heartache all blasι.
It takes me back to how I felt when I was thirteen and so thwarted - and yet happy enough to suck a lollipop in the meantime and listen to Nirvana yearningly. Thus, there's a flower-child nonchalance that The Motorettes hit very well. So, one more time...
Your Feedback
Login to post your comment