Children's innocence is magical not because of what they don't know-- sex, violence, mortality, Ashton Kutcher-- but how they perceive what they do know. In a child's mind, grown-ups are distinguished by their calves, raindrops on car windows can become aliens racing through space, and long backseat rides furnished with action figures set the stage for Lord of the Rings-scale epics. By now it's axiomatic that most popular entertainment misses childhood's true majesty, but every once in a while a Peanuts or Calvin & Hobbes hits upon just the right mixture of confusion and imagination.
The Best Party Ever, which compiles the first three singles plus five new tracks from UK-based The Boy Least Likely To, shares that youthful, existential whimsy. This isn't children's music, but it takes a child-like eye to Postcard bedsit pop awash in 1960s California sunshine with hints of country and soul. Recorders, twinkling synths, handclaps, banjos, and glockenspiel accompany the requisitely shambling acoustic guitar on songs about tigers, monsters, growing up, and "Warm Panda Cola." The Best Party Ever is a thing of wonder, made out of rubber and springs-- heartache with a sense of humor.
The band name (a regendered Morrissey song title) and the album moniker both cry "twee," and there's no denying The Boy Least Likely To's recurring fuzzy wuzzyness. But solid songwriting sets the duo of Pete and singer/lyricist Jof apart from the anonymous Belle and Sebastian novitiates responsible for stigmatizing indie pop in some hipper-than-thou circles. Opener "Be Gentle With Me" could be about new love or a budding playground friendship, and it contains multitudes of appealing elements, from its opening starward gaze to a stomping country-disco beat to bizarre non sequiturs like "I want to pick peaches off a cherry tree." Winning melodies and the album's likable if neurotic raconteur-- "Scared of spiders/ Scared of flying"-- give the quirky arrangements an emotional payoff.
Besides, for all its playfulness The Best Party Ever isn't quite the doe-eyed "Hakuna Matata" some early reviews have suggested. Jof's narrator is child-like, but it's just a case of arrested development-- a young man confronting early adulthood in this chaotic century, not with the stoned quotidian of the Streets or the post-apocalyptic communalism of the Arcade Fire, but through a regression into childhood. Thus spooky-synth jam "Monsters" sees friends and loved ones terrifying the narrator by "getting married, having babies"-- and suggesting he'd be happier if he did, too. The gleefully paranoid "I See Spiders When I Close My Eyes" briefly reveals the anxiety beneath its stiff-lipped cheer: "How did I get to be a mess so soon in my life?" Aching standout "The Battle of the Boy Least Likely To" features a prominent, "Sloop John B"-like recorder with quavering vocals about letting go; the effect is akin to a child's first encounter with death.
Yet above all, The Best Party Ever is as fun as pelting Susie Derkins with water balloons. "I'm Glad I Hitched My Apple Wagon to Your Star" lives up to its lengthy title with the best-ever musical mention of antihistamines and the tale of an ill-fated Nashville excursion over "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" oompahs. "We never did get famous, but it made us kinda happy and it kept me off of drugs!" Jof explains. "My Tiger My Heart" recalls a Psapp album title for a ballad that's a bit like "Puff the Magic Dragon" meets Calvin & Hobbes or Winnie the Pooh, as Jof relates the difficulty of being "friends with something that eats butterflies and pencil sharpenings."
The album's best song, the dreamy "Paper Cuts", channels Brian Wilson via Summerteeth-era Wilco through the lens of Aztec Camera. It's a broken-hearted ballad about helplessness against an ever-changing world, but it also points to the essential precariousness of what makes The Boy Least Likely To so appealing. "If you throw a light on something magical it disappears," sings Jof. Let's hope not.
