Should I stay or should I go? The Belair Lip Bombs seize the baton and run with one of punk’s animating dichotomies on their debut album, a classic power-pop rager about the early stage of adult life when shades of gray start to overwhelm your rosy picture of how you thought things might turn out. “Should I stay here?/Should I say no?/Should I say yes?/Or should I go?” frontwoman Maisie Everett sings on “Stay or Go,” searching for a sign to make the decision for her and worrying that harboring big dreams—the album’s titular “lush life”—is just asking for disappointment.
As the Melbourne four-piece grapple with the frustration of indecision, of non-committal lovers, of wanting to quit the rat race you’ve barely begun, their greyhound-lithe sound resists getting bogged down. Whatever fuels the great antipodean guitar pop bands—the Beths, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, the Flying Nun greats—they’ve got it (as recognized by Third Man, who are reissuing the album after its 2023 Australian release). This is indie rock made to hit right in the pleasure center, built from a sturdy record collection (Television tessellations, Breeders cool, Strokes clean, casual virtuosity à la Pavement) but also possessed of a breeziness that belies any clenched study. “Gimme Gimme” starts in sneering, chin-out “Marquee Moon” lockstep, but loosens as Everett implores, “Don’t leave me high/Don’t leave me dry-y-y,” making a giddy waterslide of her helixing vocals. If her lyrics dwell on how draining it is to have to try at everything all the fucking time, the band never breaks a sweat.
The Belair Lip Bombs primarily vault between two modes: a borderline standoffish strut so cool it makes you desperate to impress them, and rushing, headlong euphoria. Among the former, “Walking Away” holds a self-pitying friend at arm’s length, its bristling verses giving way to a slumping, defeated chorus; “Look the Part” builds tension through purposefully ugly guitar stabs and the rising feeling in Everett’s voice as she tries to make sense of an inscrutable situationship. These moments where they hold back give the exhilarating and unbridled songs a dam-breaking power.
Opener “Say My Name” careens along a downhill rail, the rhythm section jangling like a loose chain, the middle eight bobbing and wheeling as if spoiling for a fight. “Things That You Did” is an appealingly raucous combination of Beach Boys-style harmonies and atonal incantations straight out of the Raincoats’ playbook. It’s jarring to listen closely and realize this sweet-sounding song is calling out a guy for sexual assault: Either it undersells the severity of the matter, or it’s a slightly unsuccessful attempt at highlighting just how banal these experiences are.
For all Everett’s lyrics about feeling stuck, there’s also an abiding belief in something better, and the band’s dogged quest for it is infectious. Everett is capable of tenderness and rage, self-protective toughness and unvarnished soul, like Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney jostling for space in a single mouth. “World Is the One” toggles between sing-songy dispatches from a workaday life and a blown-out, raging swamp of sound that blows it all to smithereens; still, the song ends with Everett and her bandmates yelling, “This world is the one/This world is the one,” convinced it might yet live up to its potential.
On “Easy on the Heart,” she even takes herself to task, apologizing that the songs she wrote as a younger woman were full of confected emotions and scenarios—another attempt to play the part. But her admission of superficiality is anything but: The arrangement—jabbing keys, a swaying ship-shape chorus—is fresh and freewheeling, and the lyrics are a tender and honest reflection of a more innocent time. Wherever the Belair Lip Bombs may be headed, Lush Life demonstrates they’re well on their way.
