In April, Pitchfork's Nitsuh Abebe asked, "Have we reached some point where our knees jerk and we kick away anything any critic can write off as cutesy or 'twee' or associate with the wrong movies?" He had a point, of course. After a short burst of enchanting indie pop albums by Belle and Sebastian, Camera Obscura, the Boy Least Likely To, and many others in the mid-2000s, a cutesy sensibility has gone on to conquer the box office (Michael Cera, Zooey Deschanel) and the Billboard charts (Owl City). Faced with so much mainstream success, an anti-twee backlash was probably inevitable.
Sure enough, the last couple of years have seen the Lucksmiths break up, Los Campesinos! say adios to their glockenspiels, and Jens Lekman fall oh so silent. Younger indie poppers like the Pains of Being Pure at Heart and Vivian Girls ramp up the rickety distortion, while Swedish labels like Labrador, Service, and Sincerely Yours have expanded indie pop's sonic and conceptual palette far beyond C86 and Sarah Records. No-frills twee-pop definitely never went away, but few new bands lately have resonated much beyond the scene.
Say hello to Allo Darlin': a welcome reminder that any aversion to cutesy music in recent years may have been due not to the aesthetic, but the quality. The London-based foursome are firmly in the tradition of classic indie pop: Australian-born, ukulele-strumming singer Elizabeth Morris also plays in Tender Trap, the current band of Amelia Fletcher, an icon since her years in Talulah Gosh, Heavenly, and Marine Research, while bassist Bill Botting has backed former Hefner frontman Darren Hayman. The 10 songs on Allo Darlin's self-titled debut album, out in the UK on Fortuna Pop!, don't rewrite the formula for wistful bedsit charm as much as show that it can still be carried out masterfully.
Rather than the cloying infantilism of some twee bands, Allo Darlin' focuses its tunefulness on the simple pleasures and modest melancholies of young adulthood. With a flute solo and a John Hughes-inspired video, "The Polaroid Song" tackles wistful nostalgia but also sets the album's tone: "Feel like dancing on my own/ To a record that I do not know/ In a place I've never seen before." On "Silver Dollars", with chords strikingly reminiscent of Lekman's "Black Cab", Morris questions her career path and hopes one more gin and tonic will convince her romantic interest to leave with her at the end of the night. "Kiss Your Lips" ba-bas like Grease about salty-sweet kisses and Weezer's "El Scorcho", "Let's Go Swimming" puts Mazzy Star sinuousness behind imagery of a perfect day that "all the hipsters in Shoreditch couldn't style," and "Heartbeat Chili" quotes Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" for a kitchen-sink love story with fewer culinary accidents than Lekman's "Your Arms Around Me", but all of the sweetness.
The references continue-- a neurotic lover is no "Woody Allen"; a sensitive outcast in "If Loneliness Was Art" necessitates a mention of UK peers the Just Joans-- but as with the best pop, the overall effect more than justifies any clever borrowing. "My Heart Is a Drummer" rejects the notion of guilty pleasures over a chorus to which you can sing "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun". Opener "Dreaming", featuring a baritone vocal from Pipettes founder Monster Bobby, plays like an urbane update of Heavenly boy-girl duet "C Is the Heavenly Option". Which reminds me: In a year when the Hold Steady released a song about a seminal indie pop band, the twee sensibility doesn't really appear to be on the decline-- no matter how many how many jerks have twitchy knees. More likely, it's just getting started.
