The Love-Birds - In The Lover’s Corner

These days people seem to shy away from debut albums, unless there’s at least something that makes a connection, either through the PR hype or just a tidbit of information of the direction the music might be going in. And that might only make them take a listen to musical snippets.

In The Lover’s Corner is the debut by San Francisco’s The Love-Birds and it deserves to be heard more than just in streaming snippets. There are those information tidbits that can draw you to do so, and that is if you are familiar with Teenage Fanclub’s Norman Blake (who did the mastering) and Kelley Stoltz and Glenn Donaldson of Art Museums and Skygreen Leopards who shared the engineering duties.

So, if you are expecting to hear something that draws the line to the Scottish greats and their fandom for power pop sound akin to Big Star, and everything they drew their sound from, you are absolutely right. But then, The Love-Birds mix it up and mix it up so well that you don’t give a damn where you’ve heard it before.

It is all chiming and crunching guitars and melodic vocals with Skygreen Leopard’s folky acoustics here and there (“Again”), and even The Jam and Paul Weller’s pop outlook (“River Jordan”). Yes, the end of May is exactly the time you need to hear this stuff. The exemplary track here is “Kiss and Tell”, with the exact doses of both Teenage Fanclub and Alex Chilton’s guitar goofery.

The quartet adds enough intelligent lyrical content and tongue in cheek attitude, like in “Weak Riff”(not really) and closer “Failure and Disgrace” to give the album yet another texture, packing all eleven tracks in less than half an hour. Have you heard stuff like this before? Certainly. Yet it is very good and the pieces of the pop-rock puzzle are re-arranged well enough not only to make you pull out your Fanclub/Big Star/The Jam collection but to keep on pressing the repeat button, whether you are In The Lover’s Corner or not at the moment. You’ll want to be there.

https://soundcloud.com/troubleinmind/the-love-birds-hit-my-head-trouble-in-mind-records