“Rotten Love”
from the album Rotten Love
2005
iTunes
Download a free MP3 of “Rotten Love” from the Levy website
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It wasn’t until after spinning the very catchy Rotten Love a half-dozen times that I realized Levy is a modern American group. The four-piece band from New York City sounds like the U.S. counterpart to the U.K.’s Snow Patrol, featuring similar approaches to songwriting, melody and production (“On the Dance Floor,” “See Saw,” “Rivka,” and “In the Woods”), with bits of Belle and Sebastian (“Matthew”) and Morrissey (“Rector Street,” “Sunday School”) thrown in for good Anglophile measure. Singer-songwriter James Levy has a nice dark voice with which to deliver his bitter-boy lyrics. On the shoegazey title track “Rotten Love,“ reportedly directed at singer-songwriter and one-time paramour Regina Spektor, Levy croons through a wall of reverb, “She smells of rotten love.” Levy also sings that he reeks of the bad amour, too, but that’s a lot of stench to lay on a lady. The ten songs on Rotten Love, however, don’t stink at all.