The Underground of Happiness

I have a bit of catching up to do around here so let's start with this belated mention. TEEN are four women out of Brooklyn, three sisters and a friend, who make thrilling psych pop with attitude. (Teeny Lieberson, one of the sisters who gives the band its name, used to be in Here We Go Magic.) Their album In limbo came out last autumn on Carpark Records , mixed and produced with the great Sonic Boom. I don’t want to bore you all with boo-hoo promo-submission stories, but this one languished in the digital pile until now. Anyway, the lightning is finally out of the bottle. Start with 'Better', a Velvets-style piano motif laid over gurgling bass synths and tribal drums that just keeps on going. It really is the shit. I’ll do it better, I’ll do it better, I’ll do it better than anybody else, ha You will believe them. Check ‘Electric’ as well, a brilliantly garage-y bassline-with-plain-as-pie-snarebeat, that rises to a stunning crescendo with multipl...

Just got this album today – belatedly, it came out at the beginning of March – and I’ve immediately fallen in love with it. Short and very sweet, with a beautiful breathy voice at the centre, it’s just a joy from start to finish. Bill Callahan crops up twice for vocal support but it’s the beautiful balance of the production that catches the ear most – a US west coast folk sound with a twist of RnB. It’s basically brilliant. For example, the utterly captviating Close to me , which starts like a Led Zep outtake with Stevie Nicks guesting, but soon morphs into something approaching Olivia Newton John’s disco period, only so much better than that might make you think.

This is the second album from Miss Frankie Rose , former drummer to the stars (both Vivian and Dum Dum Girls , as well as Crystal Stilts ), who struck out magnificently with The Outs in 2010. If you’re expecting more of the same this time around (surf guitars, reverb, shoegaze), then for the most part you’d be wrong. Minus band, Frankie has retained a certain dreamy, enigmatic quality but the musical arrangements are radically different, with synths predominant. So there are the lovely synth-pop stylings of Gospel/Grace and Daylight sky (both overlaid with chiming C86 guitars, one of a few nods back to the previous album). That latter song also has more than a hint of ambient soundscapes about it, with a bubbling, gurgling bass running through – an atmosphere repeated on the beautiful Had we had it , with its ecstatic, twinkling chorus – which, along with the epic vocal treatments, would tend to remind you a little of the euphoric melancholy of Apparat . Apples for the sun is a cos...