With its handwritten sleevenotes, Pritt Stick-tastic cover collage, and the dog-eared pop perfection contained within, Love Kit‘s debut LP drips with a kind of homely loveliness only the most cold-hearted could deny falling head over heels in love with.
Sounding like the kind of supergroup which could only exist in your most glorious daydreams (H|sker D|’s Grant Hart and Scarce’s Joyce Raskin racing some crank-fuelled garage-pop band in a spirited dash through a set of late-Lemonheads and early-Go-Betweens), Love Kit‘s warm, raggedy jangles are winningly familiar, and charmingly fresh. Delivered with that amiable absence of preciousness which is the exclusive preserve of the American lo-fi scene, the songs are genius-savant nuggets falling nonchalantly like apples from a tree. But don’t let the relaxed approach to production fool you into thinking the songs themselves are remotely disposable.
Opener ‘Red Meat‘ is a case in point, a deliciously spare snatch of brittle strumming, rinky-dink Farfisa and killer boy-girl harmonies. ‘Bookmobile‘, meanwhile, cops some sensitive-kid-with-glasses melodic punk shapes, while ‘Tiger Beat Heaven‘ is a thrillingly primal noo-wave strut, slipping the lyric, “Ugly kids all over the world are getting it on” beneath note-perfect mid-period REM pop.
About a gazillion light years from the zeitgeist, then, is where it’s happening. Guitars. Drums. Scissors’n’glue. Marvellous.