1 Theoretical Girl
photo courtesy of toddcrawford.com
Audio Files: new British pop
Featuring Theoretical Girl, Wave Pictures, and Johnny Foreigner
By Anne-Marie Payne
Published: March 3rd, 2008 | 12:00am
Theoretical Girl’s “The Boy I Left Behind”
Her voice is all honey tones and posh English vowel sounds, reminiscent of British lovelies like Dusty Springfield and Sandy Shaw. But despite her black-fringed bob and eyelinered gaze, Theoretical Girl hasn't hopped and skipped straight from the 1960s. She's from Southend, England, and she's very, very now.
She's a girl named Amy Turnnidge, a solo artist who plays live with an all-girl backing band called the Equations. She can do the silkiest, saddest piano ballads (hunt down "Never Good Enough" for a musical accompaniment to those wistful weepy moments when you realize that your current paramour's "Just Not That Into You", and check out "The Boy I Left Behind" for a nostalgia-drenched, xylophone-spangled lament to a long-lost love).
But it's the angular guitar ones that really catch your ear and, more to the point, rescue Theoretical Girl from accusations of Au Revoir Simone–style tweeness. Check out the dueling guitars of "It's All Too Much," the aggressive guitar duet of current single "The Hypocrite", and the stabbing synths and sore-throat solos of "Red Mist," a song about being controlled by rage, available on her MySpace.
She has a deal with XL Records for her next two singles, and one of her resolutions for 2008 is to "force somebody to give me an album deal." It can only be a matter of days until she ticks that one off her list.
The Wave Pictures’ “Now You Are Pregnant”
This is one of those songs with the literary lyrics that clog up your brain and then get loose and swirl around for days. “I don't need therapy, because I've got cigarettes ... and I don't have any bad memories, only bitter regrets.” I just know these sentences are going to spill from my mouth at some point soon...
London three-piece the Wave Pictures mix the dreamy chord changes of Dy-lan's “Lay Lady Lay” with mournful violin, plaintive male voices, and scalpel-sharp, ultra-specific wordage. A long time ago the boy singing and the now-pregnant girl who is the subject of the song worked together in a shop. “I threw myself at you,” he remembers. “I threw myself away / Amid stacks and stacks of slacks and black platform shoes.” He remembers how he used to hate her boyfriend and consoles himself by contemplating the things he's achieved that she hasn't (“I've seen you selling shoes / But you've never heard me sing”).
Inevitably, his thoughts turn to a reunion. He pictures spending an hour on the train, thinking about what he might do or say, how he might “walk into the shop, talk to the other girls, and just ignore you.” It’s here that the song gath-ers speed, violins whirl, and a chorus of male voices joins in: “Or I could rush into the shop and tell you that I adore you / Because I adore you.” It's a beautiful evocation of nostalgia and longing, desire and resentment, of the way you feel when you're presented with the cold, hard facts of others' lives trundling along without you, be that in the shape of a changed relationship status on Facebook, that book deal that they got and you didn’t, or, as here, an impossible-to-ignore baby bump.
Be sure to visit this page of their Web site, which gives you access to a whole host of downloadable goodies, including a guest spot from the Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle.
Johnny Foreigner’s “Salt, Pepa and Spinderella”
Oh, those boy-girl call-and-response vocals! You wonder why all the bands don’t do them, since they sound like every heterosexual relationship ever all mashed up with a fork into two minutes and 57 seconds of bloody pop pulp, and sometimes that’s all you want from a song. Well, that and more cowbell. This song starts off sparsely, with the singers bouncing up and down and weaving around each other like they’re riding merry-go-round ponies, yelling in turn and harmonies like the Chalets (R.I.P.) never existed. Then they digress — he’s ranting while she’s all about the doo-doo-doo-doo-doos, and then: gui-tars! Drums! The horses break free and the merry-go-round tilts and the song gallops away into the sea. It’s fun!
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anne-Marie is a music writer because it's better than having a real job. (Though she has one of those, too. But we don't talk about that.) She's run AMP MINIZINE as a print and web zine since the dark days of 1999, and her journalism has appeared in Plan B, Bizarre, Sunday Times, the New Statesman, Kerrang! and, of course, Venus Zine. Read more from AMP at ampnet.co.uk/weblog, or see her work on venuszine.com here. “Audio Files” is published on the first Monday of every month.
Issue #28
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