End 2011 on a high, immersing yourself in some shamelessly naive and wonderfully quirky music. Loves It are a brand new boy-girl duo that makes a racket like a 1930’s style travelling medicine show that was reared on a diet of Jonathan Richman records. Vaughn Walters picks a mean, scratchy banjo while Jenny Parrott voice alternates between sweet playfulness and the world-weariness of a seasoned blues chanteuse.
There are a lot of Americana references in this opening paragraph alone, so you’ll have an idea what Walters and Parrott sound like. If Jonathan Richman and his Modern Lovers plundered the 1950’s canon of pop music to create their brand of naive ‘n’ roll, Loves It are digging deeper, right into a veritable drug store stuffed to the rafters with 1930’s Blues, Appalachian hollers and Dustbowl ballads.
But ‘Yay!’ is more than a musician’s trip down a potholed memory lane. Loves It are a spunky duo of working musicians who each used to play 150-200 gigs a year and bring a high octane attitude to everything they play from punk rock to honky tonk. Once their paths crossed and in between watching episodes of glamour girl Paris Hilton’s awful reality TV show - ‘Loves It’ was Paris and co-star Nicole Ritchie’s catchphrase - the two hatched plans for recording an album together.
They also fell into the ‘big hole of love’, as Parrott jokingly explains, and it’s the buzz of being a new-ish couple that adds its unmistakable sparkle to ‘Yay!’. In fact, one of the most touching songs on the album, ‘Macomber’, has Parrott reminiscing about all the little things you think or worry about when meeting your lover’s family for the first time. It’s a very intimate song, as Parrott brings us on the journey as she drifts back to a porch in Macomber, West Virginia.
Right at the other end of the spectrum is ‘Dinosaurs’, a raucous, fun-packed rollercoaster ride that includes the immortal couplet ‘I’m going extinct like a dinosaur - If you come knocking there won’t be no-one to answer the door’. Oh yay, ‘going extinct like a dinosaur’ is definitely my catchphrase of the year.
If you think that’s just too plain silly, then brace yourself for the sombre ‘Trouble Lord’, a soulful gospel ballad that’ll make the hairs at the back of your neck stand up. Just goes to show that Loves It got soul.
The album ‘Yay!’ is out now. Get it, play it and put a smile on your face.
Listen here to Loves It singing about ‘Bobby Kennedy’
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Listen to Loves It playing ‘My So Called Life’
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