Actors make terrible pop stars. Anyone who has watched through their fingers as Keanu Reeves strutted his stuff (and we’re talking about his acting and his music here) or felt their toes curl at Juliette Lewis’ efforts to paint herself as a kerrazeee rocker will understand this implicitly. Zooey Deschanel however, is the exception which proves the rule.
Deschanel, who forms the She half of She & Him avoids the pratfalls of her peers by keeping it simple. Partnered by the He side of the band, M. Ward (who keeps things so simple he only has an initial as a forename) her songs – and they are her songs – don’t try to do anything other than be great pop songs; nobody is massaging an ego here, no one is pulling on a pair of leather pants with a banana stuffed down the front.
Volume Two – even their album titles resist any temptation to do anything other than focus on the music within – manages to pull of that most difficult of tricks of sounding brand new and yet like you’ve been listening to their songs for the last forty years. There’s something naggingly familiar about them but you won’t be able to put your finger on it because nothing is derivative or generic. There’s a nod to Carole King and the Brill Building, a dash of Patsy Cline, a huge Glen Campbell reverb-drenched guitar but nowhere does the album sound anything other than a She & Him record. – which has to be a good thing.
Volume Two by She & Him is out now and recent single In The Sun will be followed in June by the album’s opening track Thieves.
She & Him play a handful of British dates in May:
07/05/10: London – Koko
08/05/10: Minehead – ATP Festival
09/05/10: London – ULU
For further information visit their MySpace here.
Early February, the sky is uniformly cardboard grey and the first big chunk of summery pop music has plopped through the letterbox of Suitcase Orchestra HQ.