There’s something I love about the debut album from , an Australian rock quintet that weirdly splits the difference between the Pretenders, Bonnie Raitt and Twin Shadow.
The band’s smooth, melodic songs roll on waves of punchy percussion and rubbery bass, visceral and grabby in all the right ways. The title track on its Universal debut, “Blue Planet Eyes,” immediately jumps out as an example, like a studio master that was hastily recorded to VHS and broadcast through 1980s TV speakers — with that sort of barely-perceptible, high-pitched white noise — then remastered because it was the only surviving document.
Have you guessed what I love about it yet?
It’s the production. Specifically, the studio engineering, mixing and mastering of “Blue Planet Eyes,” which came out on Sept. 30 and which so far sits among my Top 5 albums of 2014.
Call it comfort or familiarity, since that plays as much of a role in my tastes as the quality of a band’s songwriting and performance. I’ve been trained to enjoy the analog-compressed rhythm section-sound of Spoon, whose drummer/producer Jim Eno recorded the Preatures album at his Austin, Texas studio — and whose fingerprints basically cast the band as a catchy-ass female version of that band.
This is not to sell short the Preatures’ others skills. Smoky-voiced guitarist/singer Jack Moffitt co-produced the album as well. I’ve seen the band play its earworm singles “Somebody’s Talking” and “Is This How You Feel?” on a few different in-studio web series, and even without Eno’s deft touch they sound pretty damned tight. But it’s that signature Eno sound that really grabbed me and told me this band was something different, something that was neither overly-slick nor haphazardly lo-fi. Something deeply in the pocket.
Tastes vary, of course. Had I first heard Guided by Voices (my favorite band) playing its sloppy-drunk indie-pop nuggets in a big studio, I might have had a different, more straightforward reaction. But since my first exposure to the band was on its 1994 indie-rock classic “Bee Thousand,” I was both befuddled and drawn to the four-track tape hiss and mangled edits, the detuned guitars and corn chip drums. They set as much of a tone as Robert Pollard’s insane lyrics and deceptively sing-songy melodies.
The Preatures, which makes its Denver debut at the is a young band with what seems like a long and fruitful career ahead of it ( is a nice touch). But coming out of the gate with an album as gorgeous-sounding as “Blue Planet Eyes” already gives it an advantage for which any sane band would kill.
I haven’t heard Preatures’ first two debut EPs, which were apparently well-received in Australia, so I can’t say whether or not “Blue Planet Eyes” is a sonic improvement. I just know it sounds like a million bucks — if a million bucks was used to buy some state-of-the-art equipment in the late 1970s or early ’80s, which was then used to record some killer pop-rock tunes.
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John Wenzel is an A&E reporter and critic for The Denver Post. Follow him @johnwenzel.
