The Chalets - 'Check In' (Setanta)
3/5
By: Thomas Hannan
Bands who form (in a roundabout way) over a shared love of Shellac at an All Tomorrow's Parties festival usually don't end up sounding like The Chalets. You'd expect them to at least be a little more pissed off. It's a sound which should have been birthed at something curated by the B52s or within the Hanna-Barbera animation studios rather than in an audience to three miserable minimal rock geniuses. But after all, when surrounded with something quite so desolate, sometimes all you can do is laugh.
You imagine The Chalets spend most of their time in stitches. Costumes, bleepy synthesisers, call and response vocal lines - there's definitely a touch of the novelty about it. But something rather difficult to pull off manages to save it from coming across as a joke. When you're not aiming to be particularly musically progressive, lyrically touching or rhythmically bizarre, when the only real unique selling point of your outfit is that, dammit, you're going to be a whole heap of fun, you have to make bloody sure you actually are fun - a lot of fun.
The Chalets are, thankfully, clearly good for a giggle. It's an excellent summer record (never mind that it arrived over here in the Autumn, we've all got memories, right?), a breezy, brash collection of songs sleazy and cute in equal measure. Crucially to its success, bar the knowing wink you feel present in every track, is the fact that the beautifully packaged 'Check In' does have more than its fair share of great tunes. And, as their formative surroundings suggested, the kids know their musical history pretty well, and its knowledge they display on some of their most able moments. Early highlight 'No Style' for example, if it didn't gleam quite so brightly, could be the work of a particularly optimistic Kim Deal. But it's that shimmer to everything that makes The Chalets sound pretty distinctive (in that it is both pretty and distinctive), and it's when they sound like they're having the most fun using it that they succeed in their quest most resoundingly, 'Red High Heels' displaying the most chirpy melody on show before 'Feel The Machine' claims the prize for best track here with the simplest, jumpiest of melodies - something The Chalets do better than most.
The sheen could be the keyboards, it could be the constant residency within a major key, but best bet is that it's the work of the girls' dual attack vocals. Grating as their squeakiness can get at times, chances are that without their intermittently charming and shrill lines the record would be one left to a few embarrassed looking fellas at the back wondering why they were making such an uncomplicated, worryingly cartoonish rock record. When those lasses are on the ball, everything about The Chalets works as intended, to make whoever is within earshot feel both more suggestible and in higher spirits.
But yeah, it can fall flat on its face. No matter. It was never the most serious of records in the first place, so to take it too seriously and actually get disappointed when it fails to live up to the standards it set earlier on is perhaps to miss the point. We'll only gripe in the hope that they take notice and return with something that more rigidly sticks to the good stuff that we were unpretentiously enjoying just a few tracks ago. So then - 'Two Chord Song', why be proud of sticking to something so rigid, so dull, when you were minutes ago so electric? It'd be fine if the story you were yelling over the top was interesting enough to warrant so little going on the music, but boys and girls, it wasn't. 'Nightrocker' and 'Sexy Mistake' too, surely it bothers you that the final third of the record has only just commenced and already you've slipped in to something of a self parody? And 'Love Punch'? Don't try the angst thing, not just yet. Your voices are too sweet.
But they rescue it! We knew they had it in them. 'Beach Blanket' rounds things off with something so uncomplicatedly joyful that it would probably feel more comfortable at the start of the LP (y'know, like, with the other really good songs). But it's such a delight that everything ends on an optimistic note, the blips are forgotten, the quirkiness rather than the malfunctions what you come away remembering. The Chalets had a tough job in ensuring that 'Check In' was consistently a ripping good time. They just about make the grade.
Artists in this article: The Chalets
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