There are all sorts of holes I could pick in this – the Black Tambourine meets Hill Valley circa 1955 combination is a very, very long way from being original these days, for example.  But in the end, this is just really fucking brilliantly enjoyable pop music, with enough bite and grizzle to be beyond mere musical pastiche, and the kind of lyrics which swing between the affectionately saccharine and the hilariously cynical with such mischief I can’t help but love this album.

The swoonfully pretty ‘ba-ba-paaa‘s of DQYDJB are so brilliantly at odds with the cynical message of the song itself that I just can’t help but giggle when I hear it.  She Don’t Love You would be a cookie-cutter reproduction of the soundtrack to a million American high school movies were it not for (almost) modern touches about unplayed mixtapes and the ‘fuck, did he just say what I thought he said’ lines about the villainess of the title being caught “underneath the bleachers sucking off the quarterback” and somewhat cruel observations about her preferring “guys who play guitars“.

Now, to be fair, in amongst the brilliance there are a few songs I personally think don’t really click.  Bossanova sounds just a little bit like the reason we wrote off the Strokes, and Fool in Love doesn’t really do it for me either. The guitar solos are often of the rather cheesy variety, but when the whole album takes as much joy as this one does in emphasising and then subverting that kind of cheese, it’s just part of the fun.  It may not always work, exactly, but to quibble about it would be to miss the point.

There are elements of The Beatles, elements of The Clash even – the awesome Hair of the Dog – and that all-pervading air of a kind of candy cane nostalgia which has become so distorted in rose-tinted hindsight that it might no longer bear any real relation to an actual past.  The rough, garage elements of the production add to this sense of artifice, and there is something so inherently playful in their courting of this contradiction that even when it doesn’t click with me, I don’t mind, I still love it.  It’s the kind of album that would effortlessly charm your parents and deflower you sweatily on the sofa the minute they left the house.

The Honey Pies – DQYDJB

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The Honey Pies – She Don’t Love You

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