Like a cross between
the Raveonettes and the Juno soundtrack,
Slow Club's debut bounces between bubblegum pop and soft, quirky folk music. “If you came back as the deep sea, I would come back as the salt,”
Charles Watson and Rebecca Taylor sing during “It Doesn’t Have to Be Beautiful, Unless It's Beautiful,” effectively summing up the album’s ideology in one line.
Yeah So is stuffed to the brim with love songs -- some happy, some sad -- and the songwriters frame each one appropriately, either ratcheting up the intimacy with acoustic arrangements or cranking the volume for something more celebratory. There’s a hint of
Phil Spector in the faster tracks, whose boy/girl harmonies and booming, reverb-coated percussion help mask the fact that
Watson and Taylor only play one instrument apiece. “Our Most Brilliant Friends” and “It Doesn’t Have to Be Beautiful” are the bounciest of the bunch, both played with an energetic, ramshackle attack that’s almost borderline punk. Where
Slow Club differentiates itself from other bubbly pop groups, though, is in the slower numbers, which comprise at least 50 percent of the disc. Here,
Watson fingerplucks his way through guitar arpeggios and Taylor limits her percussion to the occasional hi-hat or kick drum stomp, while a handful of quirkier sounds -- a theremin in “Apples and Pairs,” a shoegaze guitar solo in “I Was Unconscious, It Was a Dream,” an underwater piano in “Sorry About the Doom” -- remind us that the guys aren’t taking themselves too seriously. ~ Andrew Leahey