Artist: Duo
Career: recording since 1995
Language: English
Genre: Acoustic indiepop
The hardest artifice is to sound artless. In the wrong hands it sounds like not just the music but anyone involved in getting it out in the world is guilty of unspeakable crimes of pretention and fakery. But oh, the rewards are high when it works.
This is a Portland duo of Rose Melberg (vocals, guitar, piano, drums, xylophone, keyboards) and Jennifer Sbragia (vocals, guitar, bass, xylophone, keyboards) who play the simplest songs and melodies and feelings that I could’ve never come up with. It’s got a definite naïve charm, but it’s never clumsy. It’s got a lot of strummed and fingerpicked guitar, but the performances are straight from the heart. I can hear it. And these are pop melodies, not some inscrutable vague meandering. Their major asset though: harmonies that drip with reveries of love and longing. The kind of harmonies that make a simple verse like ‘I have a yellow and navy sundress / Maybe I’ll wear it today / It reminds me of you’ fill up with memories of summer and long distant feelings.
Somewhere in there, in the most artless poetry they get the rush of new love and the disappointment of lost love just right:
Did you find a four leaf clover
Did you hope that I’d come over
Here I am and I might never leave again
But then:
Your kiss was sweet like an apricot
I guess I’m not the girl you thought
When you said this would never be undone
Your heart was pure like youth and all its charms
Now my empty arms are of no use
To me or anyone
(Eat your heart out, Aimee Mann)
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