The Lucksmiths - Untidy Towns EP

matinée 004  /  September 1998
The Lucksmiths - Untidy Towns EP
7"   $3.00

sold out
digital   $3.00


The Lucksmiths - Untidy Towns EP

matinée 004  /  September 1998

Three tracks from one of Australia's brightest pop hopes featuring ace piano, female backing vocals, jangling guitars, and expert whistling. First of two Lucksmiths 45's co-released with Drive-In Records.

Tracklisting:
  1. Untidy Towns
  2. Pin Cushion
  3. Edward, Sandwich Hands

reviews

If I had to distill the week down to a single song, though, three minutes to forever stand for both my hopes and ambivalence about my reunion, and what that says about my relationship to my past, I'm pretty confident that "Untidy Towns" could serve. Although the Lucksmiths' overall palette of styles resembles Sleepy Township's and the Cannanes' quite closely, this particular song is more polished than any of three bands' usual wont, Tali White's beatific lead vocal, Kimba Parker's breathy harmony and Richard Ogier-Herbert's spare piano combining for an effect like the Beautiful South convinced to forgo trenchant irony for just one song. The lyrics leap from solipsistic melancholy ("But for a while I'm fairly happy feeling hopeless") to earnest romantic yearning ("I know both of us are poor / But baby what are phone bills for?") and terminal awkwardness ("I say it like it's unrehearsed, / But I said it in the bathroom first") to the way our environment takes on our moods ("Past the pub where my parents met / Resigning ourselves to modern architecture"), but always return to "The boy most likely / And the girl most lovely", a pairing that, after a little too much time trying (and failing) to convince myself that "I don't think we ever met, but I called you up once to ask if you'd be in a student film I did, and you turned me down but I ended up casting one of your roommates" wasn't an obtrusively lame excuse for saying hello to Mira Sorvino, seems like a cogent point about how easily our judgments lapse, and we forget the difference between a symbol and its meaning.... "Pin Cushion" has some very nice, soft, Simon and Garfunkel-ish harmonies. "Edward, Sandwich Hand" has the cadences of a calmer version of the Violent Femmes' "Blister in the Sun", and reads like Paul Weller with a slightly more pronounced weakness for wordplay.   --The War Against Silence
 
O quarto lançamento é um single da banda australiana The Lucksmiths. Esses já são veteranos, já tem três álbuns nas costas, mas somente ano passado eles se tornaram popular devido ao CD "A Good Kind of Nervous" ter sido lançado nos EUA pela Drive-In Records. Antes disso a banda só era conhecida na Austrália. Eles tocam um pop que poderia ser posto entre o Housemartins e o Belle and Sebastian.   --Esquizofrenia