The Elvis Suicide – Sweethearts
I thought I was going to enjoy The Elvis Suicide’s Sweethearts’ when I began listening. The first track “Song for a Girl” begins with a distorted bass line and an ethereal ebow guitar. When the vocalist comes in, he sounds like a cross between the singers for Okkervil River and Bear Vs. Shark. When the song switched over into a pseudo-garage rock chorus and back again, the Elvis Suicide had me hook, line and sinker. I thought if every song on the album was going to be this good, I was in for a fun ride.
But sadly, the next 5 songs don’t live up to the promise of the “Song for a Girl”. After being an enjoyable mix of a poppy Fugazi and Okkervil River, they enter punk’n’roll mode, and don’t leave until the final track. While these middle five songs aren’t terrible, they’re just there. They add in some harmonica, hand claps and ska upstrokes at the end of “All I Need” which are interesting, but moments like these are too few and far between, and a majority of these songs have none of these moments at all. The final track, “I Should Have Changed For You,” like the first track, doesn’t fit in at all, and is all the better for it. It sounds like a more garage-y Gaslight Anthem, and leaves us wanting more.
All of the songs on the album are under two minutes, which seems like murder for the first and last track (because they are so good), and a mercy killing for everything else (you hear thirty seconds of these songs and you get all you need to hear). Although there are a few highlights on Sweethearts’, the majority of the album reminds me of off-brand pop tarts: they are sugary, and you might even enjoy the taste at times, but once you are done eating them, you feel like you had nothing at all.
By Stephen Harris
