LA SERA - Hour Of The Dawn

With the experience of the now-disbanded Vivian Girls definitively over, the lovely Katy "Kickball" Goodman gets back to work on her La Sera project and puts her signature on yet another power-sunshine pop snapshot titled "Hour Of The Dawn", the third chapter of her brief and honest parable away from her historic band. The album, it's worth clarifying right away, is preceded by a significant statement of intent from the young New York bassist, who in interviews over the past few weeks presented these ten tracks as a meeting/clash between the sugary girl-groups of the Fifties - explicitly citing the divine Lesley Gore of "It's My Party" - and the incendiary impetuousness of California's Black Flag. All things considered, and extending the judgment to her entire "solo and backed" output, the experiment only half succeeds.

As expected, Katy coos about loves ended or never begun, TV-drama romances and sad drunken nights spent at high-school parties, once again proving herself a seasoned muse of American female summer-pop alongside Best Coast, Dum Dum Girls and (very) good company. Small, catchy and innocent musical watercolors in their cunningly "dirty" delivery, retromania and hooks galore, simple melodic lines with no great ambitions; of the hardcore urgency of the "pirates of Hermosa Beach", in our view, there's not even a trace.

Yet the garage and surf-punk premises of "Losing In The Dark" seemed to open the door to a new approach, more full-blooded and rock-leaning than her previous work. Seemed, indeed; the power-pop of "Running Wild" and "All My Love Is For You", the ballad with a whiff of Babyshambles complete with "sha-la-la" backing vocals in "Summer Of Love", and the Smiths-esque "Fall In Place" and "10 Headed Goat Wizard" confirm what we already knew about Goodman and her past and present partners in crime. In a word: good form, but often not enough substance to back it up.

The talent is there too: the soft nostalgia of "Control", hypnotic and captivating just like its protagonist's voice, proves it. There's good stuff even when the sun goes down and the sea turns dangerously choppy, as on the closing "Storm's End", whose only flaw is fading out too soon, right at its best moment.

And so "Hour Of The Dawn" (the album, but also the song) slips by light and sparkling without however really leaving a mark, handing us a band polished to a shine yet still unready for the definitive leap in quality.

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25/05/2014