🎶 2022-04-07 20:42:00 – Paris/France.
The novelty song is a dying art form. The deliberately silly and often deeply annoying earworms of unestablished artists are rarely considered in today's pop universe. Instead, they've been replaced by the viral hit: a song from a rising star that quickly goes from obscurity to ubiquity, quenching appetites for novelty and surprise with a bit more freshness and classroom. While viral success implicitly commands attention, it doesn't tend to be gimmicky — usually, the accompanying social media craze (TikTok dance, or at the time, Twitter meme pattern) s 'in charge.
Wet Leg: Wet Leg album cover
Every once in a while there comes a viral hit that dances on the edge of novelty territory – comedic, a little weird and infuriatingly catchy – but, above all, not without some serious musical panache. In 2019, that song was Old Town Road, the country-trap hit by Nicki Minaj stan turned musician Lil Nas X. Last year, it was the minimalist indie number Chaise Longue by Isle of Wight duo Wet Leg, aka Rhian Teasdale and Hester. Bedrooms. Over a monotonous bassline and booming post-punk riff, deadpan Teasdale intoned a series of non-sequences – suggestive quotes from Mean Girls (“Would you like us to assign someone to butter your muffin?” ) to suggestive allusions to academia (“I went to school and got the big D”). The chorus — essentially, "on the Chaise Longue" repeated endlessly in staccato style — combined with the group's vaguely rude name sealed its eerie, teenage appeal.
With 13 million Spotify streams, the numbers aren't exactly at driver's license levels (this particular viral hit is over 1,3 billion streams), but the hype that Chaise Longue has generated on both sides of the Atlantic is far from insignificant – they came second in the BBC's influential Sound of 2022 poll and appeared on several late-night US chat shows. Still, there's a price to pay for such teasing flamboyance. First of all, you risk being perceived as an irritant – I'm not the only one who found Chaise Longue's irreverence rather ersatz, and his supposedly witty innuendos sound more like inanity sub-Carry On. Second, you introduce some skepticism to your first body of work. Is Wet Leg just a flash in the pan?
While their self-titled debut will no doubt disappoint fans of endless double-meanings, it risks converting cynics. Much like Lil Nas X did with their debut, the duo didn't repeat the style of their hard-hitting hit, but instead produced a much more subtle and conventional record. Wet Leg – mostly recorded in cocooned circumstances before the release of Chaise Longue, with the help of producer du jour Dan Carey (Black Midi, Fontaines DC) – is a collection of 90s and 00s indie that is alternately dreamy, lush, catchy and thunderous, and layered with lyrics saturated with millennial disaffection, anxiety and overwhelm.
The tracks that end the album are among the best examples of this approach: the opener Being in Love – in which an original and satisfying twist on the idea of infatuation as mental instability is relayed through the medium of a delicate/delicate rock – and closer to Too Late Now, a stormy tribute to the opportunities that pass you by and the alienation that sets in. The latter has a gratifying break of self-doubt, when the music pauses to allow Teasdale to document her existential angst as it spills over into the track she's currently performing: "I don't know if it's a song / I don't even know what I'm saying… I don't know if that's the kind of life I saw myself living.
The quarter-life crisis — rendered in messy, anxious, circular thought patterns — is perhaps the unifying motif of Wet Leg. On the psychedelic I Don't Wanna Go Out, whose recurring riff nods to Bowie's The Man Who Sold the World, our narrator is "almost 28, and still getting rid of my stupid face." On Angelica, sour-sounding guitars soundtrack to a woman miserably going through the motions at a party; Oh No ponders the infinite scroll while barely managing to suppress the shrill panic.
There's more bits in the face – with its humming bassline and roaring roar, Supermarket's story of being stoned while doing the department store is reminiscent of first-wave British punk in spirit and subject , while Wet Dream adamantly rejects the idea of being the object of masturbation fantasies – but there's a maudlin air to those too. The music is more muted and bittersweet than on Chaise Longue, as are the jokes – which make sense this time around. That Teasdale and Chambers are able to treat big lines as disposable remarks — like on the sweetly incantatory Loving You, which features the jibe: "I hope you're choking on your girlfriend" — is proof that they have wits to spare.
You have to admit that in the age of Streaming saturated with content, coming up with a bit of goonish novelty probably isn't a bad way to start a career. Wet Leg certainly got people listening, and by channeling their sense of humor and showmanship into a series of tracks that were much more nuanced and three-dimensional than the maddeningly repetitive song that made their name, they made sure that their debut album is well worth hearing – over and over and over again.
SOURCE: Reviews News
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