It’s the sound of two women stoking mutiny from a slow descent into madness, scratching at the yellow wallpaper. Her seditious tenor moves songs with slightly pathetic subject matter-wanting to leave a party, getting sucked into your phone-beyond the tediously hymned woes of messy white twentysomethings to lead the charge against succumbing to existential hell. As she chants about being trapped in bad scene after bad scene, her vocals lurch and spiral, sidling away from the unrelenting rhythm section and canine guitars like a child going floppy to escape her parent’s arms. “You could ask 100 people to sing it and it wouldn’t sound the same,” Iggy Pop said approvingly of “Chaise Longue.” The way Teasdale sings it is one of the defining qualities of Wet Leg’s self-titled debut. Wet Leg have hooks stuffed with bait-and beyond convincingly consolidating past eras of guitar pop, they ply an idiosyncratic line in wild-eyed choruses that unspool in run-on bursts of mania, building to terminal velocity, tripping on internal rhymes, and dragging you down with them.Įxhibit one: that hit. The 2004 British wave stopped wanting to make “music for girls to dance to” and got sophisticated (read: boring), and the space they left was quickly filled by lumpen “whoa-oh-oh” football terrace chanters. For years, that bubblegum melodic facility seemed to have deserted bands of this ilk. (On “Convincing,” the album’s biggest tonal outlier, Chambers sings wryly devastated Angel Olsen cosplay.) But it’s a sound that endures endless retreads as long as the hooks are good. Teasdale and Chambers are carpetbaggers in the ultimate carpetbagging genre: You can play Magic Eye with their speed-addled guitars, tilting the music this way and that to spot flagrant trace notes of the Breeders, Parquet Courts, Wire, Pulp, Pavement, MGMT, the Strokes, Courtney Barnett, Blur, Elastica and a billion more bands besides. (It’s often said that their home of the Isle of Wight lags 20 years behind the rest of the UK, and Wet Leg’s suffocating social circle sounds straight out of 2005: the Cribs’ “ Hey Scenesters!,” Art Brut’s “ Formed a Band” and Arctic Monkeys’ “ Fake Tales of San Francisco” writ large.) You might wonder whether Wet Leg embraced indie rock as part of their larky shtick-what could be more ironic than messing around with a destitute genre?-if they weren’t such a good study. Apparently they barely had time to meet their future label, Domino, because they were too busy “rolling around in the grass doing teddy bear rolls with the guitars.” Their lyrics cringe with embarrassment on behalf of anyone deluded enough to be in a band, with their warm beer and crap patter and arty parties. They repel seriousness, claiming they only started the band for fun-on top of a Ferris wheel at a music festival, no less-and their songs mean next to nothing. talk shows the subject of approving texts from your dad. Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers arrived fully formed with the kind of infernally catchy indie rock hit not heard since the days of Franz Ferdinand and were instantly everywhere: played to death on British alternative radio on Jools Holland and late-night U.S. If you don’t already love Wet Leg, chances are their swift rise and self-deprecation induce a particular kind of cynicism.
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