Not many up-and-coming artists would admit to a day job at mass-marketing email company Mailchimp. But Mattiel Brown need fear no accusations of cookie-cutter insincerity. The genre she and the band that bears her name have chosen – punky garage rock with a Dirty Water Club-style vintage finish – attracts many a paper-thin stylist, but could they deploy the line “you want to submit it all for peer review” with the aplomb Brown does on the irresistible strutting rockabilly of Rescue You? For all the Tarantino growl and spaghetti western shlock of opener Til the Moment of Death, this second album carries itself with more assurance than last year’s eponymous debut, with songcraft and witty wordplay coming to the forefront. There’s much here to love for fans of Holly Golightly and affiliates, or formative influences the White Stripes and the Black Lips. Yet Mattiel have mastered their own mischievous energy on the likes of Millionaire’s narcotic bluesy balladry with deadpan backing vocals lifted from the Velvet Underground’s Femme Fatale, the finger-clicks and semi-spoken Tom Tom Club vocal of Food for Thought, or the skittery-cymballed, funky Heck Fire.
