"SWM seeks female companion. Likes: obscure mid-80s British indie, home recording, BBC docu-dramas, cryptic album art. Dislikes: having picture taken, using birth name. Not opposed to LDRs." Mayfair Set principals Mike Sniper (aka Brooklyn bedroom rocker Blank Dogs) and Dee Dee (aka one-woman L.A. garage band the Dum Dum Girls) didn't come together through some makeoutclub.com-style online hub for lonely, lo-fi enthusiasts, but given the limited information available about this secretive, camera-shy outfit, it's as good an origin myth as any. Because the Mayfair Set's debut EP, Young One, feels very much like a relationship forged in separate bedrooms thousands of miles apart, with Sniper and Dee Dee's shared points of interest and strikingly similar M.O.s ultimately underscoring the distance-- both spatial and aesthetic-- between the two artists.
If the eight songs here weren't actually conceived via FedExed cross-country cassette swaps, then great care has been taken to make it seem so; often Young One feels less like two people collaborating together in the same room than each taking turns dubbing their parts over one another's decaying demos, with faint traces of taped-over recordings bubbling up into the murky mix. If Blank Dogs' distorto-pop tends to soak Sniper's vocals in static, on "Already Warm" he's practically buried beneath the Earth's crust, adopting a deep, almost comical gothic warble that makes Dee Dee's corrosive coos shine like high beams on an 18-wheeler. Extreme contrast proves to be Young One's defining quality, be it the beauty-and-the-beast dynamic between the two leads on the fuzzed-out funk of "Let It Melt", or the way the chilly post-punk pulse of "Desert Fun" suddenly yields to a bright, beach-bound chorus that sells you on the promise of "fun, fun in the desert sun," as if having fun amid the opressive heat of a desert sun was a plausibility for these agoraphobes.
Sonically, the Mayfair Set hew much closer to the Blank Dogs' mechanized squall than the Dum Dum Girls' garage rock, but Sniper is under no illusion as to who's got the better set of pipes, maintaining a shadowy presence while Dee Dee takes control of the liquefied C86 pop of "Junked!" and the curious, girl-group-gone-dub showcase "Three for Me". But it's on "Dark House"-- tellingly, the one track where Sniper's voice complements rather than competes with Dee Dee's-- that the Mayfair Set feels like something greater than just a casual, lo-fi lark between friends. Here they deliver a potent dose of dream-pop melancholy that conjures the surrender-to-the-sea imagery of the Cure's "Just Like Heaven", but grows more intense and despairing with each line-by-line trade-off. It's the moment where the Mayfair Set overcome the binary, back-and-forth quality of a long-distance relationship, and start to feel more like a natural, face-to-face interaction.
