Ah, that difficult first album.
So many ideas to draw upon, so many influences to cite. Melbourne trio Pearls – named after the 1981 Elkie Brooks compilation album if their cover image is anything to go by – might style themselves “glam-pop” but, monster opening track Big Shot aside, they’re anything but. This is aspirational indie, in the mould of Paramore. Pretend You’re Mine suffers from a stadium inferiority complex. The band’s guitarist, singer Ryan Caesar, clearly admires The Edge’s guitar work in U2, particularly on songs like Pride (In the Name of Love).
All the instrumentation on this band’s debut album is wrought large, in faux glittering stars. The big guitars feel at odds with the slightly seedy, mixed down male vocals and the occasional reverb-laden guitar lick on Better Off Alone that sounds like it wants desperately in on the remake of Twin Peaks. Or at least the last album from fellow retro 80s Oz pop band, the award-winning Jack Ladder and the Dreamlanders (which itself is a smart copy of a copy of a copy).
Big Shot is an excellent way to open the album, though – if somewhat reminiscent of Tame Impala breakthrough track Elephant (the initial metronomic rhythm is almost identical). Like a male Goldfrapp or contemporary Suzi Quatro (why do critics always mention Marc Bolan, never Suzi Quatro?), the percussive oomph is way to the front and the vocals are oblique and alluring enough to merit numerous replays. Although if you’ve come in search of a seedy good time you’d be much better off sticking with Iggy – who this song also recalls, albeit in a more pre-digested form.
If you’re thinking this song might be indicative of the album, however, you’ll be sadly disappointed. The only time this glam stomp of a sound is reprised is on the album’s closer, the infectiously intoxicating title track – another bass speaker-shaker of a song, marred only by the subdued vocals.
Elsewhere, the juxtaposition of Triple J-aimed radio pop production and the generic guitar sound lend the otherwise likable enough drumming and melodies an unlooked-for aura of “chancers”.
Pearls don’t feel true, even to themselves.
Unlike Jack Ladder, there’s no sense of a finely wrought identity or a carefully crafted sleazy underbelly that sits in pleasing counterpart to the mellifluous croon. Instead, there are lashings of reverb and echo chambers and portentous middle-eights.
Some of Pretend You’re Mine sounds like late 80s-era Cure but without the necessary pathos or self-laceration (Straight Through the Heart). Some sound like the drearier aspect of early 90s shoegaze minus its drunken late night charm.
There’s a song lifted from the 2013 Australian Nuggets tribute, a “psychedelic” cover of the Standells’ bluesy garage rock classic Dirty Water, that pretends to freak out. The way it swaps the nastiness and energy for washes of guitar noise is woefully misjudged. (Don’t Perth band Pond do this sort of thing so much better?) And its inclusion makes one wonder whether Pearls put all their money into producing the opening track and then made do the best they could with the remainder.
This is all too polite, too reverential to connect as classic rock the way some of Pearls’s cited influences once connected. It’s not loose enough, not spontaneous. Not that that matters with glam-pop – but it ain’t glam-pop either, not mostly. Aside from Big Shot and the closing track, Pretend You’re Mine, it’s generic radio-friendly indie, indistinguishable from entire generations.
• Pretend You’re Mine is out on 20 February
