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Barsuk | charlybliss.bandcamp.com |
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A refreshing afternoon breeze whistles through the sun-dappled grass. Your brand spanking new fresh-off-the-line Walkman is playing the latest from Hole or Alanis Morissette. Leaves drift down from the shady boughs of that old oak tree, just beginning to curl and brown at the edges. To complete the picture, your voluminous jeans flutter and flap gently like the sails of some great denim ship.
Charly Bliss are a warm summer afternoon circa twenty years ago.
Before Tamagotchis and MySpace there were terrifying Furbies and hefty phones with approximately the ballistic potential of bricks. Before EDM and dubstep had even speculated about the possibility of rearing their pixelated heads, we can look back on the jangly guitar-rock of the nineties with rosy fondness, when people were looking back on the jangly guitar-rock of the seventies with rosy fondness.
But beneath the joyfully fizzy surface of Guppy sizzles an oilspit turmoil of emotions. (Fun fact: Wikipedia lists the album’s genre as bubblegrunge.) Sheathed within that gauzy retro aesthetic are a razor-sharp wit and a jaw-dropping capacity for one-liners.
“Does he love me now that his dog is toast?” they quip, summing up a one-sided relationship with enviable concision; then again, but darker: “Lost my will to the black hole / Stuck my gum on his soul”.
Belied by such a sunny exterior, it takes a moment for Guppy’s cleverness to sink in — by my count around the memory span of a goldfish — and when it does, it leaves you wanting more. Wanting to scrub back a few seconds and appreciate it again, a task ironically nigh-impossible to perform on a Walkman. Comparisons to such other throwback acts as Veruca Salt and Jawbreaker are all well and good, but Charly Bliss’ neat trick, their casual deftness, recalls the laid-back stylings of Courtney Barnett. In more ways than one, Guppy is a saccharine reflection of the bone-dry Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit.
Experience as intended: relaxed on the sun-warmed grass in your daggiest jeans.