The Wendy Darlings Review
June 22, 2009 – 8:18 pmFrom Wear The Trousers Magazine:
The Wendy Darlings
We Come With Friendly Purposes EP •••••
LostMusic
Back in the early 1990s Washington DC underground band Bratmobile were creating something of a stir with their debut (and only full-length) album Pottymouth, a political twee-pop declaration that bounced from feminist propaganda to playground chants. Meanwhile, in Glasgow, the newly-formed Bis followed suit with the added charm of garage guitars and a dual girl–boy vocal. It was with the premise of this trendsetting DIY punk explosion that French trio The Wendy Darlings was conceived. With their debut release We Come With Friendly Purposes, frontwoman Saddam Suzy, bassist Dr Poppy and drummer DJ Sephia have made one hell of a racket. But it’s an encapsulating racket that takes all that was good from the Britpop and riot grrl uprising and smashes it into seven two-minute balls of radio-friendly lo-fi gone berserk. Ammo in hand, the band charge at the modern day competition with all the glamour of The Pipettes dressed up for a night of carnage.
To say that the release is fun is an understatement. Lead track ‘Get Up’ paints a telltale morning-after escapade of arty drinks, loose limbs and hungover Myspace browsing, before the EP really spreads its legs and erupts with ‘Eleasy’ – Suzy’s confession that “the Wendy D’s are too nerdy for me” and she’d prefer to be playing in an all girl-band, and would be if it weren’t for her current bandmates paying her. The childlike spite behind the lyrics is unfussy, though it can get a little lost behind the cranked guitar. Nevertheless, corkers such as “Don’t want to kiss you any more when everyone says you’re gay” (‘My Friend Ray’) and “my old boyfriend he didn’t know how to play / he told me so but he didn’t know how to play” (‘Eleasy’) are reminiscent of the technique Art Brut used to win over the crowd with their debut Bang Bang Rock & Roll.
Elements of pop culture peek through all over as The Wendy Darlings namecheck a fictional US crime detective in ‘Kojak’ and sing of bowling alley romance in ‘Bowling Shoes’, while ‘My Friend Ray’ eerily resurrects the same promiscuous character that featured in Le Tigre’s ‘Les & Ray’. Elsewhere, standout song ‘Enormous Pop’ features handclaps nicked unashamedly from Los Campesinos! and, coming in a close second, ‘Eins Zwei’ creates chaos with nonsensical German barks. The band themselves have dubbed their sound ‘naughty pop’, not dissimilar to Das Wanderlust’s self-proclaimed ‘wrong pop’, and we can only hope this twisted take on chart music survives long enough to go down in history, just like their pioneering foremothers carved their own indelible imprint. As We Come With Friendly Purposes so excellently proves, the fame would be well deserved.
Lostmusic Presents: An indiepop night with a distinct international flavour!