reviews / 2012

LA SERA - Sees The Light

Name: LA SERA – Sees The Light
Item: Sees The Light
Rating: 5
Author: Michele Saran

2012 (Sub Pop / Hardly Art)

alt-rock, power pop

by Michele Saran

Katy Goodman's project, already known as bassist in Vivian Girls, La Sera, follows up her self-titled 2011 album with a story-album about the emotional aftermath of a breakup, “Sees The Light”.

Goodman unveils the dreamy “Love That's Gone” and “It's Over Now”, the Ramones-esque “Please Be My Third Eye” and “Break My Heart” (with vocal trills that at times recall the Brian Wilson of “Good Vibrations”), and the radio-friendly “Drive On”. Even simpler, and just a touch more effective, are the rhyming nursery-rhyme of “I Can't Keep You In My Mind” and the country-pop ballad “I'm Alone”.

The “experimental” front is represented by “How Far We've Come Now”, a watered-down version of the Cranberries' “Zombie”, and “Real Boy”, downright necrophiliac in its Petula Clark-style dance-hall trot.

The sprawling New York hierarchy headed by Frankie Rose, then Vivian Girls and Dum Dum Girls, and from there numerous solo, parallel and collaborative projects, finds in Goodman (nom de guerre: Kickball Katy) its conservative offspring. With a voice better suited to a barbershop quartet, and a handful of little songs torn between a whistleable refrain and something with more body, she rinses, cleans and dutifully packages feminine turmoil into pop ditties of various stripes. Impeccable production.

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05/03/2012

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Michele Saran, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition