On their promising debut, The Noyelle Beat, the young Sheffield trio Standard Fare struggled to nail a wobbly sound, one that veered between wide-eyed Rainer Maria emo and tart-tongued, caffeinated indie pop. I saw them at New York City's Cake Shop, ground zero for still-forming indie pop bands, and they were bursting with energy that didn't quite make it into their record. The album's highlights-- "Fifteen (Nothing Happened)", in which lead singer and bassist Emma Kupa struggled mightily with her temptation to sleep with a 15-year-old, or "Philadelphia", where she waited a year to revisit an overseas fling in the titular city-- hit upon an acidic, wide-eyed middle ground. One their stellar, charming follow-up, they sound like a band who has figured exactly how to braid together the different corners of their record collection.
Their secret weapon, undoubtedly, is Kupa. Her voice is an endearingly sideways yowl, one that often finishes lines on an unexpected upward lilt. She also has a disarming way of expressing her nerdiness and horniness in the same awkward, honest breath. "I can see it in your eyes, my eagerness is showing," she laments in "051107", a line that more or less encapsulates her blurting, clammy-hands appeal. "Older Women" is about just that: "I hear you're into older women/ Do you know what you're doing/ When you take them on?" she demands. She comes off like someone's older-than-you-think little sister, squirmy but direct about sex.
She has refined her songwriting voice from The Noyelle Beat, as well, so that no songs on this wry, sprightly album fail to keep the momentum. Kupa has a distinctly British-songwriter knack for lacing lyrics with hyper-specific information: "Half Sister" begins with, "It must have been 20 years since I last saw you/ Throwing up Cherry-Aide in my father's car/ Now I find out you're living four streets down/ From your grandmother's Christmas cards,” and like a great Ray Davies song, you can feel whole lives sketched out in a few plainspoken lines. The seamless verse-chorus-verse transitions that mark "Suitcase", "Dead Future", and "Kicking Puddles", meanwhile, mark some of the band's most assured songwriting.
Standard Fare have gained some welcome horsepower, too: There's nothing "ramshackle" about the wildly zig-zagging bass line that darts through "Bad Temper", or the genuinely ripshit guitar solo that erupts two-thirds of the way through "Suitcase". The album is exuberant, neatly sequenced, and over in about half an hour: a modest joy, but great indie pop is an accumulation of modest joys. Out of Sight, Out of Town is, in fact, great indie pop: It's also the first encouraging sign of a career band hitting its stride.
