“Wrong Choice”
from the album Hind Hind Legs
2006
iTunes
The Lovely Feathers seem poised for success: They hail from the buzzing indie beehive of Montreal; they’re labelmates with Islands on the newly formed Equator Records; hell, they even have a name derived from the animal kingdom and Marcel Dzama-esque illustrations on their album sleeve. But it isn’t merely the contemporary cred signifiers that make Lovely Feathers a potential hype band; it’s the music.
Armed with a sophisticated pop sensibility, the Lovely Feathers are never short of musical ideas, as they spastically shift tempo, volume, and style in highly compressed spaces. The songs are unpredictable, leaping from barely-there strumming and whispered vocals to bombastic full-band arrangements. Album opener “Pope John Paul,” for example, effortlessly packs at least five different parts — only two of which repeat — into less than four minutes.
Unfortunately, the band’s eccentric approach to songwriting is mirrored in its disastrously quirky lyrics. Pop music needn’t be literate or even literary to be great, of course, but too many of these songs are marred by distractingly precious words. Often the delivery is tongue-in-cheek; elsewhere, cringe-inducers like “I like the chapped skin above your eyes/ Even when you complain about my hives” from “Mildly Decorated” are sung with what sounds like conviction. Such couplets, when paired with this high level of musical invention, mark the Lovely Feathers as heirs to the Unicorns’ legacy of smart-ass pop. But where the Unicorns managed to situate their cloyingly cutesy lyrics in an album-wide concept about death, there’s no such coherence here, just grating loose ends. Sometimes the lyrics manage to be amusing, but mostly they’re as irritating as the aforementioned chapped skin and hives.
Still, there’s strong evidence here that the Lovely Feathers are a superb indie pop group in the making; enough, even, to make you forget the lackluster lyrics. “In the Valley” is the band at its tightest, as the thumping bass of its disco-tinged intro gives way to razor-sharp guitar interplay and a swooning string section. “Wrong Choice” is classic indie rock in the Weezer vein, with sing-along verses and swelling choruses.
The Lovely Feathers have the potential to shape their ideas into something more focused, and the songs on Hind Hind Legs would have carried more weight had they not been sabotaged by silliness and fluffy wordplay. Maybe Yanofsky had this in mind on “Ooh You Shocked Me,” when he sang, “Who has a heart? I have a heart.” Perhaps next time, he’ll prove that sentiment to be more than just another ironic line.