Molly

Peach Melba

Written by: TL on 11/04/2015 13:23:13

Their band is named the same as MDMA. Their album is named the same as a yogurt flavour. Their music sounds like the band you'll find on one of their t-shirts if you have a look around their facebook photo album. Molly from Copenhagen play fast and fuzzy, with guitar riffs ringing against each other in sentimental keys, while the drawling vocals lean against the instrumental backdrop in a way that transports your thoughts directly back to the late 80s and 90s. Back to Hüsker Dü, whom the band seem more than a little inspired by, but by extension also to what you imagine loads of other bands sounded like in the early rehearsal stages, before they went on to become the stars of the following decades.

In terms of contemporary references, Cloud Nothings and Japandroids are probably the most comparable to what Molly are doing, keeping a tight yet immersive expression where for once it works to expect of the listener that we listen past the guitars to hear the vocals and lyrics. Here Malte Hill on vocals and guitar brings to mind guys like Kurt Cobain and Garrett Klahn (of Texas Is The Reason) with his drawn-out singing. Yet one of the cool things about "Peach Melba" is how it manages to send your mind all over the place, to even more references than that, despite how homogenous it appears overall.

Take a song like "People", which gives you an urge to dig up Foo Fighters' classic "Monkey Wrench", while "Leave Your Feelings In A Jar" sounds like Kasper Eistrup (of Kashmir) singing against a noodling guitar that could've been leftover from Jimmy Eat World's "Static Prevails" recordings. The nuances change across the record along with the chord progressions, even while the energy stays the same - driving quickly forward, with tracks mostly ending before the third minute - and it blinds you to your progress sort of the same way as you would get blinded to your own speed by driving for hours on the motorway through a sunny landscape.

On the upside, it's a joyous, hypnotic sound, and with the songs often flowing together, the first half of "Peach Melba" can feel like one long cohesive song. The downside is that you can grow weary, and the change of pace in the intro to "Believe Your Lies" certainly comes at a good time, even if the song soon jumps back to the same gear. The trippy "Alive" on the other hand, is perhaps the album's lone dud, and it indicates the band's main challenge moving forward, namely that their grasp of things get shaky when it comes to diverging from their core expression.

For the time being, this might not be the biggest of problems, as the bright, reverberating guitar figures on "Peach Melba" are charming in their own right, and they hint promises of making your skin tingle should you catch the band live with a favourable sound mix. The songs are entirely on the simplistic side though, especially if you listen to them right before putting on something similar, yet more lively and unique, like Cloud Nothings or Texas Is The Reason for instance, which makes you hope that the band won't stick too stubbornly to the dogmas of "Peach Melba" when time comes to move forward. However, if they can keep the faith in the influences of theirs that otherwise rarely get acknowledged in the current musical climate, and simply expand their own skills at songwriting, the platform they've established here figures to be one we'd be very keen to see elaborated in coming years.

7

Download: Leave You Feelings In A Jar, Believe Your Lies,
For The Fans Of: Cloud Nothings, Japandroids, Hüsker Dü, Texas Is The Reason
Listen: facebook.com/lovemollyband

Release date 07.04.2015
Self-released

Related Items | How we score?
Comments
comments powered by Disqus

Legal

© Copyright MMXXIV Rockfreaks.net.