Chorusgirl: Chorusgirl

Happy New Year.

I was hoping to write this little review of Chorusgirl's eponymous album, released in November 2015 on Fortuna POP!, while it was still one of this years fresh releases. Due to the steady march of time, I am belated, but still confident, in saying that this album is one of the most exciting bits of new music I discovered (as usual, by recommendation) last year.

This is gloriously mischievous music from the self-styled noisepop, jangle 'n' roll band from London. I could tell from the outset that this album was going to give me exactly what I was after, as foretold melodically by the guitar at the start of Oh, To Be a Defector. It takes some great musical skill to give the listener such repeated satisfaction like this without being in any possible way predictable.

Probably poppier than my average listening, but in a good way, Chorusgirl for me has an airy and timeless feel, woven with definite echoes of Blondie and the Beach Boys, and what I recognise as real old rock 'n' roll. I feel quite a blunt instrument about giving such musical references, having wagged a lot of the diligent musical schooling that allows one to wax lyrical about who exactly sounds like who or what, but I can definitely tell that there is the energy of more than one decade diffusing through this album.

My obsessive listen has definitely been Girls of 1926, kicked into life by *that* intro, that should without doubt appear in the musical dictionary under the entry "noisepop"; there's something so neat about how the instrumental lines so often "sing" the vocal lines to us, both in unison and in snatches throughout (not just this song, but the album). Oooh, waah ooh. Upbeat though it is, there is a tender touch of melancholy in those two beating hearts that stay forever seventeen.

Above and beyond that though, there is something decidedly naughty, nay delinquent, about how the words fit the music, that just draws me back and back again, to this track as well as No Moon, This Town Kills, and Shivers.

There's part of me that wants to quiz the band in an excited sort of a way and find out what inspired all these songs, what they are all about. I'm tantalised because I'm not quite sure I know what makes it all tick; like a magical toy whose workings remain a mystery, or reading Dickens, that I appreciate deeply but would never be able to write. I've had so much pleasure out of this, and I think that's down to the fact that it's clever, entertaining, and above all, extremely catchy.