In 2010, Argentinian songwriter Max Claps and James Hoare, of UK indie-poppers Veronica Falls, started a London band named after a song by so-square-they're-psychedelic 1960s baroque-poppers the Free Design. What the Proper Ornaments have in common with "The Proper Ornaments", from 1967 opus Kites Are Fun, isn't immediately obvious, but it starts with a penchant for hypnotic harmonies and continues with an insistence on the right decorations. Where those sunshine-y forebears quasi-ironically skewered "Mad Men"-era superficiality—"brand new car," "hat and gloves," "pretty wife who you almost love"—the '10s model proudly accessorizes itself with scruffy neo-psych.
The stylistic touches on Wooden Head—billed as the Proper Ornaments' proper debut LP after last year's promisingly ramshackle Waiting for the Summer, which collected previously released singles and EPs—are extraordinarily ordinary ones for an indie band. Next to those sweet Beach Boys vocal counterpoints sit Byrds-buzzing guitar interplay and some-Velvet Underground-morning detachment. With its rickety eight-track recording, you'd be hard-pressed to guess whether the album was influenced more by the O.G.s or their offshoots: the British C86 scene, California's Paisley Underground movement, New Zealand's Flying Nun label. In woolier moments, throw in the Beta Band. In shoegazier, throw in Ride or even early the Verve. There's a song called "Stereolab"; it actually sounds a bit like a Stereolab.
As that list of comparisons probably suggests, the Proper Ornaments mix and match these related yet distinct sonic accoutrements well enough that they might one day become a reference point themselves—which you might expect, considering they've shared bills with fellow magpie-connoisseurs such as Crystal Stilts, Woods, and Real Estate. As with those bands' efforts, though, Wooden Head is strongest when it leaves you remembering smart hooks rather than a clever aesthetic. Check out "Magazine," maybe the breeziest song ever from the point of view of ammunition, or elegiac finale "You'll See". Weather, a recurring theme since the previous record, is beside the point on the gentle "Summer's Gone", which applies the sepia softness of the Clientele to being "old enough to lose your own mind."
For every band like Deerhunter or Los Campesinos!, who turn their indie-inclined record collections into something appealing of their own, music history is littered with others who mine the clerk-approved past without adding much to those halcyon days at all. Claps and Hoare, joined here by bassist Daniel Nellis and drummer Robert Syme, certainly skirt that risk—the guitar chimes on "What Am I to Do?" bring to mind "Dear Prudence" by the Beatles, whose enshrined-in-marble likeness rarely flatters anybody. But the Proper Ornaments may have been just as shrewd in naming their album as in naming their band: Wooden Head was the title of a 1969 odds and ends compilation by the Turtles, released after the "Happy Together" group split. As humble, tastefully appointed psych-pop goes, the Proper Ornaments surely have their hearts—and heads, wooden or not—in the right place.
