Review: The Babies - The Babies

Artist: The Babies
Title: s/t
Format: Full-length
Year: 2011
Label: Shrimper
Genre: Garage punk/lo-fi
Rating: 77 / 100

A new Vivian Girls album, a new Woods album, both released this spring, and like it's still not enough; here is the first The Babies album. Basically a collaboration between Vivian Girls' Cassie Ramone and Woods' Kevin Morby, together with Nathanael Stark from New York based punkrockers Bent Outta Shape and Justin Sullivan from Ringers. This album is, as expected, indeed some kind of mixture between the punk'ish garage sound of Vivian Girls and the freakfolk from Woods (especially present in the second half of the album).

After listening the album around five times I started looking around on the interwebz whether there were some reviews on this album, suprisingly the first rated this album 4.5 and Pitchfork didn't go any further than a 5.8. One of their biggest problems with the album seem to be a lack of originality, making it hard to stand out in the lo-fi crowd. I have to admit this isn't one of the most progressive albums that came out this spring (I will have to give that award to Kurt Vile, or maybe James Blake), but I rarely heard anyone complain about this while listening to some garage rock band. Yes, it's simple, not it's definitely nothing original, but damn it contains some fantastic catchy tunes. I can imagine a party to tracks like Meet Me In the City or Breaking the Law would be pretty damn fun.

Why oh why didn't you rate it a bit higher then? Well, from Sick Kid on it seems Kevin Morby takes over much of the songwriting (even though I read he is the main songwriter on this whole album), resulting in a bit slower, bit lethargic style of music, definitely more on the Woods side of the musical spectrum. I enjoyed the new Woods album (review soon), but after going party hardy on the first half, the second isn't very special, quite relaxing, definitely not bad, but nothing I would write my mom a letter about. Normally tracks like these can grow on me after listening more often to them, like the first Junip EP's for example, but in this case even after listening the album over 5 times, there's still no mixture of adrenaline and endorfine running through my veins, like what happened while pulling the first half through my well washed ears.

There are some excellent little pieces of garage gold to be found on this album, without any doubt, but the major part of the second half is just a bit too superfluous to really make this an amazing album, for now I'll have to stick to pretty damn ok, resulting in the earlier mentioned score.

Spread some love, ór become a Hypomanie groupie, the choice is yours,

Selwin.

PS: if you have any album you would like to see reviewed here, please write something adorable in the comment section.