Irony is a fickle mistress. There was a time when an author couldn't get a book published in this country without a heady dose of the stuff. Now there's a million-dollar market for literalist (but no less bodacious) claptrap about adultery or impending nuclear holocaust, for those who aren't up to Madame Bovary or A Childhood's End. Music, meanwhile, has performed an inverse about-face: Where Mötley Crüe, and their fans, once proudly patronized strip clubs, folks who dig The Darkness constitute a putatively "enlightened" set. Similarly, there may be some ulterior motives behind Surferosa's Day-Glo merriment. Frankly, I no longer care. This irony shit has gone too far. When it all boils down, the songs are what matter, and by that standard, the Norwegian quintet are as indistinguishable from novelty as artists like Andrew W.K. and Electric Six.
Naturally, Mariann, the group's luminous lead singer, has already attained celebrity status in her homeland, and was reportedly the subject of a feature-length documentary on one of Norway's highest-rated television channels. Her presence here is that of Debbie Harry in Blondie, or, more aptly for her comparable suck quotient, Gwen Stefani in No Doubt: It could be anyone playing behind her. For better or worse, she dominates. Shanghai My Heart's 11 songs all carry the same saccharine vibe, bouncing from verse to chorus to verse on bubbles of blithe synth and hackneyed riffs-- and Mariann's brazen ubiquity is hardly captivating or original enough to sustain the gimmickry.
Unfortunately, Surferosa are unrelentingly catchy. After a listen or two, you'll likely find many of the songs on Shanghai My Heart entrenched in your brain like terrorists in an Afghan cave, and it may take some serious sonic artillery to smoke 'em out. But no lame simile could fully convey the unadulterated poppiness of this album; that task is best left to the omnipresent forebears of Surferosa's rah-rah retro rock.
Despite "Lucky Lipstick", which opens the record on a promising note, Shanghai My Heart suffers from a dearth of original ideas, and fails to resurrect those it parses in a noteworthy manner. Adding to the list of bands that have rehashed kitschy musical trends in wildly exaggerated form, Surferosa take aim at Debbie Harry and Kim Wilde with the same outrageousness with which The Darkness and Electric Six took to schlock rock, and the result is equally vacuous.
"Canuba Toystore" is replete with quixotic guitar-synth interplay that might have helped get Rocky pumped for his showdown with Ivan Drago. Meanwhile, over the track's power-chord-laden intro, a petulant Mariann shouts, "This is a song about... toys!", in what could perhaps be an awful twist on the Pixies' "Tony's Theme" off the album from which this band takes its name. Elsewhere, "Neon Commando" and "Olympia" dish out synth-happy dross that falls somewhere between Avril Lavigne and "Hit Me With Your Best Shot". Particularly brutal is the nonsensical "Bim Bam Boom", which aspires to poignancy in its grave chorus: "Scooby, Scoo-by Doo/ Bim, Bam, Boom/ Bim/ Bam Boom."
Self-proclaimed "fun" music is notoriously difficult to pull off without slipping towards vacuity. Major keys and songs deluged in synthetic production effects aren't inherently bad; rather, their relationship with poor songwriting is stigmatic, not causal. Shanghai My Heart isn't repellent because of its convivial synths and aseptic production, but in this context, these elements only serve to make weaker songs more obnoxious.
