(Dew Process/Universal)

Indie pop will eat itself

If you’re in an indie-pop band – and Lord knows we have enough of those here in Brisbane – prepare to be crushed. New York quintet Freelance Whales cover just about every trope of the genre, and do it better. They have quirky, hand-built instrumentation – a “Frankenstein organ” from bamboo and parts harvested from broken organs – vocal harmonies that I can’t help but describe as “soaring,” and liner notes with a cute little graphic novella about love from beyond the grave. They even have a drummer with a fucking watering can as part of his set-up. There’s nothing that you could do to be better at this game than these guys are. And this immaculate grasp of the genre’s tropes is what has both endeared and frustrated overseas listeners about Weathervanes, Freelance Whales’ début: it’s so perfectly a product of the zeitgeist that it can feel cheap, even calculated, as though someone at Sony Music HQ had designed a band to feature in the soundtrack of every film starring Ellen Page or Michael Cera. To stick to that judgement would be a little unfair, though: lead songwriter Judah Dadone has the chops to craft beautiful pop tunes such as album highlights Kilojoules and Ghosting, so there’s a little more going on here than meets the eye. Unfortunately for Freelance Whales, that “a little more” doesn’t save Weathervanes from sounding like an album that epitomises a whole genre at just the moment when that genre reaches saturation point and starts sounding gauche.

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CHAD PARKHILL

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