A FAVORITE FROM FIVE YEARS AGO
“Me and the Skirts”
from the album Exhibit A
Original release date: September 14, 2004
iTunes
April 28, 2005:
A highly accomplished debut from Deep Southerners, the Features (and one would expect no less from a band who have been playing together since 1993), Exhibit A presents a giddy half hour of swirling hillbilly pop, with a sinister edge to a style that would make tracks like “Exorcising Demons” and “Harder to Ignore” fit nicely on the soundtrack to a Tim Burton movie.
The fantastically named organist, Parrish Yaw, who, according to the band “looks as if he just strolled out of some eighteenth century ghost town,” holds the whole outfit together and maintains that vital American-gothiccircus- sleaze-chic which should ensure that the Features find their fans in likeminded trendy young things, and not articulated lorry drivers.
There’s no denying the strength of the actual songwriting on this LP, with more than a small amount of anthem potential in tracks such as opener “Exhibit A,” and the obligatory new-wavemeets- country floor filler “There’s a Million Ways to Sing the Blues,” but it offers an increasingly saturated and jaded market nothing new or particularly necessary.
The Features’ press people might push comparisons with the Buzzcocks, the Attractions, and Sparks but there is, nevertheless, an inexorable REM-MOR quality to this record that pervades their overly considered musical mania. Self-consciously deranged singer Matt Pelham sums up his band’s sound eloquently in the chorus of the second track, “Me and the Skirts,“ with the phrase “a little bit angry, a little bit tame.”