Hearts and Unicorns kicks off with "Kevin Is Gay", which opens with some indecipherable gibberish and guitars that squawk a simple theme over layers of bent, distorted chords. It quickly drops away to just Annie Hardy's innocent voice over a simple drumbeat and sunny synthesizer bass. From this, you probably wouldn't guess that Giant Drag has just two members, singer and guitarist Hardy and drummer Micah Calabrese. Calabrese's left hand should get a third of the credit, triggering the programmed bass that somehow becomes the glue holding together "Kevin Is Gay" and later the kiss-off anthem "This Isn't it", among others.
"Kevin Is Gay" ends with Hardy singing the melody with "meow" in place of every word, and segues into multi-tracked studio banter where she demands with uncontainable glee to hear the song played back. "Cordial Invitation", reprised from the group's consistently overdriven Lemona EP, gains a fleshed-out arrangement, recast here as demure acoustic pop. "This Isn't It" is another track recycled from Lemona, as is "yflmd". "This Isn't It" is just as inviting as the earlier version, giving the spotlight to Hardy's voice and Micah's hand during the verses, until three distinct chords in the chorus deflate all the momentum, as if Hardy's stopping the car to give someone an added awkward goodbye from the driver's window. "yflmd" retains a snaky guitar line that sounds like To Bring You My Love-era PJ Harvey, with come-hither lyrics that get a little creepier with context. (The song title is an acronym for "you fuck like my dad.") What's more memorable than the psycho promiscuity the title suggests is Hardy's countermelody on guitar that takes us to the chorus ("You're just like my father.")
"High Friends in Places" treads the same ground-- man-eating promises over cantankerous swells of guitar ("One wasn't clean/ One wasn't man enough for me"). There's moments when they vary the approach, adding horns to the swaying rhythm of "Blunt Picket Fence" and creeping electronic tones to "Smashing". By and large, the two-man formula is stretched for all its worth, though the bouncy "You're Full of Shit (Check Out My Sweet Riffs)" or the strong vocals of "My Dick Sux" transcend Giant Drag's simple formula.
All these silly song titles and nearly frightening studio patter scratch the surface of something, the way the snippets on a record like Surfer Rosa add another layer of inscrutability, but monochromatic guitars overwhelm the album and mute the few moments of quirk. The two gems here are the bored kiss-off "This Isn't it" and the effortless "Slayer", which closes the album. Hardy softly murmurs the melody, sliding through a riff with a pristine guitar tone over the gentle 4/4 thump of the bass drum, adding the barest back-up harmony. Yes, Giant Drag sound good with the guitars cranked to 11, but they sound great when they're barely trying. If you make it through the maniacal bonus tracks, you might get the feeling I did: That Hardy could be a far more interesting frontperson than Hearts and Unicorns lets on.
