The Mary Onettes, a guitars-and-keyboards band from Sweden, don't make any excuses about sounding awfully 80s, and their indie-romantic touchstones aren't so different from any other new-wavers': This debut album includes broad, obvious borrows from both New Order and the Cure, and fainter echoes of plenty of other stars from that constellation. The main difference is the side of this stuff that they're interested in borrowing. These days, lots of acts look back on New Order as the serious-minded dance-music pioneers who made "Blue Monday"; the Mary Onettes sound more intrigued by the swoony, chart-topping pop of a song like "Regret". Lots of acts draw on the Cure for their spikiness, their spookiness, their goth; the Mary Onettes would rather compete with "Just Like Heaven." When they reach the height of unembarrassed pop on this record-- on a song called "Under the Guillotine", which their singer pronounces, lovably, "gilly-o-teen"-- it's not hard to imagine them being shoved unnoticed into a glossy 80s-station lunchtime playlist, somewhere around "I Melt With You" and "Take On Me" and "Under the Milky Way".
And so here's the slick, earnest, romantic, spiffy-haired pop music that most of today's new-wavers try their best to harden up and steer clear of, generalized and blurred out to the point where it feels more like just big dreamy radio anthems than an imitation of anything-- we endeavor not to stereotype, but how Swedish is that?
Like all experiments in the field of "perfect pop," it has its pros and cons. The good news is that bright, breezy, joyful retro always beats the kind of retro that pretends it's still fierce and original, and the generalist pastiche of the Mary Onettes' big singles feels generous, charming, and not at all ripped off. "Lost" might start out a bit New Order, but it quickly blows up into grand teen-movie hooks that only a grump could find much fault with: They actually capture that ideal mid-80s quality of sounding like they're posing happily in slow motion, one of the music video's many gifts to the vocabulary of actual music. This is their main strength, really-- on songs like "Lost" and "Void", the Golden Age they're conjuring comes back through their melodies and song structures, not just the superficial business of synth settings and production styles. (Melodies rarely feel like they're copying anyone in particular; an era, a genre, but rarely anyone in particular.) They're good enough at this that even when their retro styles are amusingly blatant-- the glacial synth-bath of "The Laughter" is just a recreation of Cure songs like "The Funeral Party", and "Slow" nips happily from all of New Order's shiniest hits-- it doesn't seem to matter: It's the hooks you're listening for, not the style, and these guys' hooks are practically out there wrestling with Tears for Fears.
The bad news is that it does matter, something that comes clearer when the band isn't so much reminding you of another era. You're listening for dreamy hooks, not style, sure-- but once they drop that borrowed style, it turns out they don't have a whole lot of their own. We have a word for good, earnest, romantic hook-writers lacking in style, and that word turns out to be "corny". Tracks like "Pleasure Songs" and "Henry" feel like their swoon potential is buried in a sea of middling pop-band moves (and tame, muted production that sands off what few rough edges liven up their stage show)-- an even bigger shame when, as on the chorus of the former, the melody really does seem worthy of some starry-eyed daydreaming. Style is a hard thing to come by, and these guys may not ever come around to much of their own. But if they can turn out a few more singles like "Lost" to slot onto mixes and obsess over for a few weeks, well, that'll be plenty appreciated on its own.
