Blood and gore might currently be ruling American music, but for Long Island’s [a]Joy Zipper[/a], love conquers all. Vincent Cafiso has got the dry and lazy drawl, Tabitha Tindale the childlike voice and the ready Nancy Sinatra comparisons – but mostly they’ve got each other.
Their debut album is sweet and strange in equal measures. There’s some shameless harking back to the ’60s, and the brief appearance of shoegazing horrors, but mainly it’s packed with sumptuous melodies as Cafiso and Tindale canoodle and coo at each other. It should be sickening, but ‘Like 24 (6+1=3)’ and ‘Booda’ sashay past, blessed with minor idiosyncrasies and summery tunes, while ‘God’ sounds like The Beatles might’ve done if they’d all adored each other.
Such moderate attempts at psychedelia can be traced to the fact this album was – reputedly – written on acid. A story that seems implausible on the pedestrian folk rock of ‘Pillow’, but [I]is [/I]eminently believable on the warped time lines of ‘Transformation Fantasy’. What’s more, it’s beguiling enough to have you singing along to lyrics like, “our death is inevitable” as though they were ‘baby I love you’.
Rather than naively cutting themselves off from the world, [a]Joy Zipper[/a] gently embitter the sweetest of pills. If love should fail, things could get really nasty.