Album Appreciation: Wet Leg by Wet Leg

I take my music quite seriously… probably more seriously than most other things in life. It gives me lots of pleasure and shapes who I am to a considerable extent… a significant amount of my identity and lifestyle are wrapped up in it. As such I think that I probably have an irrational aversion to frivolity in the music I listen to… I like it to be considered/ serious/ earnest/ thoughtful/ creative… you get the idea. However, every so often there is an album that comes along which I just find fun… that’s not to say it’s devoid of the above qualities… but that’s not it’s raison d’etre. I can probably count such albums on the fingers of a couple of hands… but when they get to me I cannot let the go… and this album by Wet Leg is one of them.

This is certainly not something I was expecting when I first heard ’Chaise Longue’ last year… I thought it was brilliantly catchy and clever, with a stylish and self-deprecatory video… but I expected that that would be me as far as Wet Leg were concerned… but as single after single got released I found myself getting more and more into the band’s sound… and having fun in the process… very strange.

After ’Chaise Longue’ came ’Wet Dream’ (not a sentence I ever expected to write), another really well crafted pop song which has humour, exasperation and sexual politics… as well as a great reference to the film ’Buffalo 66’. Then came ‘Too Late Now’ and ’Oh No’, both of which showed a different side of the band… alluding to a more rock perspective… each track for me building a broader picture of what an album might look like… each of these track got lots of airplay in our house… and were backed up by the final two singles before the album’s release.

‘Angelica’ is the latest in a select number of great tracks about terrible parties… probably something of a hybrid of what has gone before it has some great pop hooks and rockier moments… and finally ’Ur Mum’… which is something my kids would say… showing that I’m not exactly the demographic for this band… nevertheless I like the clean lines of this track and maybe I might even get some parental brownie points here too (it has swearing)…

All of which means that I had heard half the album before it came out… which left me both excited and wary as to whether it would hold together in the same way as the previous tracks have. After all there are a long list of albums that have disappointed following a spate of brilliant singles… and I have to say that it mostly does hold up… with the remaining six tracks being far from filler… I particularly like the very funny ’Supermarket’, and the musically sharp ‘Convincing’. The rest I think that I can probably put down to my lack of familiarity and ’demographicness’ (my word) and actually there’s nothing here that I find myself reaching for the skip button for… and I have a hair trigger for such things…

All in all then this is a terrifically fun and entertaining record which I know is one I am going to come back to again and again (‘Chaise Longue’ is probably my most listened to track of the last 6 months)… not my usual music by any means but it cheers me up no end.

‘Wet Leg’ is out now on Domino.

-o0o-

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