Her's – Songs of Her's
Every time someone says ‘Mac DeMarco’, another group of chorus pedal-bearing, 20-something slackers form a band... or so it would appear. Spend three minutes in the company of Songs of Her’s and you’ll think the curse has struck again. Spend any longer with the Liverpool pair's debut mini-LP, however, and you’ll be riveted to the edge of your seat, gleefully awaiting whatever they’re going to do next.
Sidestepping the tricky issue of that jarringly awful apostrophe in their name, here Stephen Fitzpatrick and Audun Laading bear out critical assertions that the hype surrounding them is justified. Yes, the spirit of DeMarco hangs heavy over some of their woozier moments (Cool With You and You Don’t Know This Guy in particular), but they show enough imagination and carefree abandon across the rest of the album to suggest they can step out of the Canadian’s imposing shadow. I’ll Try closes out the album with a delightfully Smithsian flair, and the throwaway Cop Theme lives up to its eponymous promise, but ultimately their cross-genre dabbling always feels like the product of a singular narrative, and one that (you’d hope) can only get better.
It’s almost a tragedy that the best moment here – opener Dorothy, which rolls in on a loping, addictive bassline that suggests some glorious hybrid of The Cure, New Order and Wild Nothing, and nearly trumps them all – should prove such an outlier; none of the eight songs which follow can quite match up to that standard. Still, there’s compelling evidence here to support the theory that this drum machine-led duo could become more than merely a band with potential: these stars are surely set to rise. Or should that be star’s?
Listen to: Dorothy, I’ll Try, Marcel
Buy Her's - Songs of Her's on LP/CD from Norman Records