Album Review: Veronica Falls – Veronica Falls
Take a healthy dose of 80’s indie guitar pop and add an equal measures of shoegaze and 60’s pop melodies. Make a well in the middle and pour in a small amount of surf guitar. Make sure you’re feeling a little down and mix it all together in a slightly shambolic way, making sure you don’t make the mixture too glossy. Leave in a dark corner to set. This is the recipe Veronica Falls used to create their self-titled debut long player, and the result is rather tasty! Leaving the cooking references aside (they have after all been well and truly exhausted), this debut from the London based quartet is quite remarkable.
Following a similar path to such indie luminaries as Crystal Stilts and the Vivian Girls, and having released the album in the US first (on Slumberland) you’d be forgiven for thinking that Veronical Falls were a US band but this quartet of two boys and two girls are as English as bacon and eggs (sorry!). From opening track ‘Found Love In A Graveyard’, a dark tale of ghostly love, to album closer ‘Come On Over’, ‘Veronica Falls’ is loaded with gorgeous pop melodies and infectious bass lines, topped off with the sweet voice of Roxanne Clifford and juxtaposed with dark themes such as death, lost love and suicide. It’s always tough with a strong album suh as is to pick out favourites, but best tracks would have to be ‘The Fountain’, ‘Stephen’ and the aforementioned ‘Come on Over’ in which Clifford’s voice is so enticing I almost feel like I want to cross over to the other side!
It’s not often that an entire album grabs me on the first listen but this one just refuses to leave my head. If I have one complaint it’s that at 36 minutes it’s over a little too quick, but nonetheless a shoo-in for my top ten of the year.9/10
Mark Cousens
Out now on Bella Union
