Allo Darlin' - 'Allo Darlin'' (Fortuna Pop) Released: 07/06/10

It is generally considered that to be different, exciting, and to get noticed, you need to have something that others don’t, to come up with unexpected ideas that no-one else has thought of. As a result, new bands are falling over themselves to be complicated and intricate, to use this digital technology or that obscure instrument, or to discover a killer chord sequence never before heard by human ears. So when, every now and again, a band come along who merely get on with the simple business of writing songs consisting of verses, choruses and middle eights, we breathe a sigh of relief, dance along, and wonder why they don’t do this more often.

Camera Obscura have flown the flag for this genre since the turn of the millennium, and various corners of Sweden have followed suit, producing the likes of The Concretes and Those Dancing Days.

Now Allo Darlin’ are here to give us another sugary shot in the arm, and make us all wish either that we were 17 again, or that it was still 1962. A record which seldom attempts subject matter any more complicated than love, cooking or having your first kiss at the funfair, singer Elizabeth Morris’s Queensland accent injects a sunshine feel which makes these songs seem lighter than summer air.

Opener ‘Dreaming’ is a lush pop ditty about young romance at the local disco and has future single written all over it, while second track and previous single release ‘The Polaroid Song’ has the sort of tempo that quiffed and ponytailed young sixties couples would have jived to with abandon, mouthing the refrain to each other (“feel like dancing on my own/to a record that I do not know/in a place I’ve never seen before”).

‘Silver Dollars’ tells a familiar tale of being young, in love and skint, doing romance on a shoestring, while ‘Kiss Your Lips’ is the aforementioned fairground romance, complete with clever insertion of lyrics from Weezer’s ‘El Scorcho’.

There might be nothing new in the subject matter, and nothing especially original about the arrangement or instrumentation, but there is still something special about this record. The use of the ukulele as continuous melodic nuance rather than sporadic stick-out novelty, and some expertly understated slide guitar, give the music more depth and integrity than a straightforward guitar band might be able to muster, and something in Morris’s breezy vocal delivery makes this album worthy of soundtracking this UK summer, or whatever there may be of one.

The standard is maintained from start to finish, ‘If Loneliness Was Art’s ode to sensitive boys in baggy jumpers likely to ignite a spark of recognition in Morrissey fans, lyrically if not musically, while ‘Woody Allen’ sets to music the age old debate among teenagers with time on their hands of who would play you in the movie of your life.

Towards the end, ‘Let’s Go Swimming’ is a highlight, it’s delicate pace and Morris’s breathier-than-ever vocals making a song about eating sandwiches by a lake seem like a philosophical penetration into matters of life and death.
A few days of sunshine, a little radio play and a few well-placed festival slots, and we could be hearing Allo Darlin’ in our heads all summer long. We wouldn’t regret it.