In rotation: Veronica Falls
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A series in Sunday Calendar about what Times writers & contributors are listening to right now...
London-based Veronica Falls don’t dilly-dally. The music is lean, and the lyrics curt. “The Box,” for instance, sounds as if it was written for sharing a malt at the soda-fountain. Yet singer Roxanne Clifford will make her company think twice. “I know you’re old,” she sings, “but you’re a hand to hold,” and then she gets back to the song’s two-minute burst of shimmying grooves and effervescent guitars.
This isn’t an album of young love gone bust so much as it is one of young love gone tragic. On the opening verse of “Found Love in a Graveyard,” the hazy-voiced sweetness of Clifford sounds as if it’s locked in a dead-eyed stare. Patrick Doyle doesn’t harmonize as much as hover, and every brush of the guitar is spotless-clean, even as the minimal ol’-fashioned pop jangle builds to a trot.
The call-and-response “Misery” is a love-letter to sulking, and perhaps the album’s most glistening rocker until it dissolves into a spooky religious hymn. A dark undercurrent worms through “Bad Felling,” but this short summation shouldn’t lead anyone to believe this is a downer of a record. “Bad Feeling” is just one of many songs that’s an adrenaline rush, with a constantly flexing riff, a lead guitar that’s full of twilight shading and harmonies to swoon over.
Veronica Falls
Self-titled
Slumberland Records
ALSO:
Mannequin Men, punk rock at its most relaxed
The emotional toughness of the Dum Dum Girls’ ‘Only in Dreams’
--Todd Martens
