The Underground of Happiness

A couple of years ago, I heard Wussy for the first time and fell in love with them, when Damnably Records compiled the best moments from their career to that point on the Strawberry album (they were about 10 years in or so at the time, with four albums under their belts). ( Here's the link for that 2012 round-up.) This song is taken from their 5th album, Attica , which came out last May. Of course, 'Teenage wasteland' was also a song by The Who a few decades ago. The Wussy vintage takes that shimmering guitar part of the Who song as a kind of starting point, and proceeds to "answer" from the perspective of a middle American who grew up with The Who. That would be Lisa Walker in this case, one of the band's joint vocalists and songwriters along with Chuck Cleaver . What she makes out of this dynamic is a moving paean to the power of rock n roll to cross oceans and affect lives. It's wonderfully heartfelt, personal, delivered in one chord more o...

Don't you just love it when a new band comes into your life, out of the blue, and reminds you why you fell in love with pop music in the first place. Meet Wussy , a 4-piece band from Cincinnatti. They've released several albums over the past decade and gained fulsome praise from esteemed sources across the Atlantic, such as Robert Christgau and others. For their first release outside the US, Damnably Records have compiled some highlights from previous albums to produce a thrilling set of tunes. I like to think of the music as a ballsier, fuzzier, more blue-collar even, version of Luna (who I love, so you know...). That's to say, this record would sit comfortably between The Velvet Underground and Yo La Tengo on your shelf (alphabetically too, as it happens). It's rare to find songs you've never heard before that you feel like singing along to out loud on the street. That's the effect of the twin vocal, twin guitar attack of Chuck Cleaver and Lisa Walker ....