Review Summary: Engaging, lovely, and ultimately disposable indie pop.
The New Zealand boy-girl duo that make up the Brunettes have always symbolized the good and bad of twee music, from its ability to create gossamer-thin, beautifully catchy pop to its unfortunate tendency to dip into dreamy flotsam that only serves to showcase numerous harmonies and multiple instruments. 2004’s
Mars Loves Venus was a classic in lo-fi indie pop, utilizing Jonathan Bree and Heather Mansfield’s intertwining vocals to adorable perfection, while 2007’s
Structure and Cosmetics fleshed everything out but seemed to lose some of that childlike luster in the process. Like their chosen genre, The Brunettes have always straddled the line between cute and sappy, between heartfelt and banal, and fourth album
Paper Dolls will do little to change these perceptions.
But is that really a bad thing? When you make such effective head-nodders as the Brunettes effortlessly do, it would seem not, especially now that Bree and Mansfield have turned to that omnipresent influence, electro, on their fourth effort. It’s a welcome addition to their sound, and one that frankly feels like it should have been there all along. Opening track “In Colours” features the band’s trademark tinkly piano and boy-girl verses, but the added bass end the synths bring and the stabs of keyboard augment the band’s typically sparse setup quite favorably. Sometimes it can be a bit much, like on the wildly syncopated, everywhere-at-once drum machine fever of “Bedroom Disco,” and the band’s affinity for cheap, tinny bleeps and boops can overwhelm at times – listening to “It’s Only Natural” had me thinking I was on
Blue’s Clues with its irrepressibly happy bells and Casio effects. But when it all comes together, like on the brilliant “Red Rollerskates” or the trippy title track, it adds a whole new dimension to the band that make one wonder how they didn’t get around to this sooner.
Of course, all these added sounds and studio effects only serve to mask the overriding problem behind
Paper Dolls and the Brunettes in general, namely their inability to overcome the limitations of their genre over the course of an entire album.
Mars Loves Venus worked because it was so intimate, so casually welcoming that it seemed like you were watching the duo perform at a local coffee shop. For all their sharp beats and plush hooks, no matter how damn cute Mansfield always sounds nor how Bree nails the role of straight guy perfectly with his Everyman vocals,
Paper Dolls too often seems, like its title, two-dimensional. Sure, “Connection” is a great pop song, but after five equally adept examples of How To Make A Charming Pop Song before it, nothing is really there to captivate the listener that wasn’t there before. It’s what makes much of the middle of
Paper Dolls blur together into bouncy drums and sprightly vocals that never really seem to say anything.
Thank the twee gods then (I think they’re somewhere up in Scotland) for the last three songs here, which leave much more of a lasting impression than what came before. It’s mostly the work of the ambient, dreamy electronics in “Magic (No Bunny),” awash in fuzzy guitars and fuzzier “sha-la-las,” and the Brunettes’ realization that the best hooks don’t have to pop up within five seconds of the track’s start. “If I” subsequently teaches that less can, more often than not, be more, and its Mansfield’s angelic closing vocals combined with the sudden onslaught of brass and percussion that is the highlight of the record. “Thank You,” meanwhile, closes things out in stereotypical twee fashion, with a verse that goes “we will miss you / we will think of you” with all the honesty of a visiting friend. It’s corny as hell, but it’s also such a sunny, pleasant closer that you can almost feel everything click into place as it ends. It’s a lot like the record as a whole, an album that will never win any awards or change any lives but will happily provide you with the soundtrack to a crystal clear summer day and a road trip with friends. It’s a tough job to make such engaging, lovely, and ultimately disposable pop music, but someone has to do it, and the Brunettes certainly don’t seem to mind.
