"Heartlight," whatever that may be, has lent its name to a personal favorite young adult science-fantasy novel by T.A. Barron, a Marion Zimmer Bradley witch-story paperback I came across three minutes ago on Amazon, and of course, the rousing Diamond/Bacharach pop song. It makes sense that Joy Zipper would adopt the phrase, given their obvious debt to My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, the phosphorescent pink glow of which come closest to sonically approximating its compelling image. On The Heartlight Set, Long Island duo Vinny Cafiso and Tabitha Tindale continue to let that oneironautic influence shine in a greasy rainbow alongside Stereolab and the omnipresent Pet Sounds.
At the outset, Joy Zipper's latest looks to augur a slight shift. First track "Go Tell the World" all but sends up the band's frequent White Stripes comparisons (y'know, 'cause they're a couple) with Tindale's talky, blues-based vocals calling out over a swinging drum beat. Shortly, though, the typical swirly Shields-isms snuff the budding retro-rock in familiar shoegaze-era production values. The Belle & Sebastian pop of "Anything You Sent" is another exception, veering dangerously close at the chorus to the "come on, come on and dance all night" section of Lovin' Spoonful's "Summer in the City". By the record's end, songs like horn-lightened "World Doesn't Care", catchy yet endlessly repetitive "Rockdove", and diaphanous, immersive finale "Holy Driver" return to the band's status quo.
In their sonic appropriations, Joy Zipper most resemble Snow Patrol's polished Final Straw. Indeed, first single "You're So Good" has Tindale and Cafiso both sounding notably Lightbody-esque over simple, crunching guitars, and the lyrics share Lightbody's intra-relationship emotional space without his string-yanking specificity. Forthcoming single "1" is a catchy gray spot, laying Cafiso's unspectacular love poetry ("you're the one") atop one of the recycled chord progressions that allowed 90s alt-rock radio to exist. A fizzy guitar lead during instrumental bits jumps straight out of the solo in Weezer's "Across the Sea", but the words are more Green Album.
My childhood Heartlight involved vast galactic struggles worthy of L'Engle, if not Lucas or, humph, Dubya. Joy Zipper's meticulous dream-pop is, similarly, in the realm of the tesseract-enabling science fantasy, but its emotional palette ranges mostly between kinda-melancholy ("Thoughts a Waste of Time") and sorta-happy ("What You Want"-esque "Window"). OK, there's also the incongruously tawdry "For Lenny's Own Pleasure" (that's Bruce, natch). No Diamond, though.
