EERIE WANDA - Pet Town

The first time I came across the Dutch/Croatian musician was back in 2015 when, reading the list of musicians chosen by Jacco Gardner for the Cabinet Of Curiosities set, part of the Le Guess Who? festival, alongside Os Mutantes, Nick Garrie, Death and Vanilla, Dungen, Michael Rault and Jacco himself, the name of Marina Tadic's band popped up: Eerie Wanda. A few months later, the release of the album "Hum", featuring Jasper Verhulst and Nic Niggebrugge (members of Gardner's live band) in the lineup, revealed the band's graceful pop attitude, cradled in dreamy, almost psych-folk and baroque atmospheres.

But dreams are often followed by a rude awakening, and that's the reason I approached the new Eerie Wanda album, released by Joyful Noise, with caution and with a guilty delay. What makes "Pet Town" interesting is its taste for arrangements that ape neither British nor American pop, as well as the odd temporal dimension framing its ten songs. The melodic core is laid completely bare, with just a few elements conjuring up a '50s atmosphere that feels both carefree and mysterious, almost a hybrid of Elvis Presley and the Addams Family.

Few tricks and minimal instrumentation make up an album that carries the scent of Young Marble Giants (the lopsided country-western of "Big Blue Bird"), the velvety grace of Weekend ("Magnetic Woman"), the hypnotic allure of Hope Sandoval ("Moon"), and even the rockabilly touch lurking behind Suicide (the gorgeous "Sleep Eyes", which opens by quoting the riff from "Jailhouse Rock").

A guitar, a voice, a Roland CR-78 keyboard and a rhythm kept by handclaps are the common denominator of these little songs, which at times seem to come from another dimension: nimble melodies with curious folk/surf contours (the title track), sometimes nostalgic like a duet between Roy Orbison and Richard Hawley ("The Intruder"), apparently breezy ("Rockabiller"), yet enchanting like an exotic dance entrusted to a folk-punk band (the skeletal rock'n'roll of "Hands Of The Devil").

Jasper Verhulst proves once again a faithful companion in Marina Tadic's adventures, while former Altın Gün member Nic Mauskovic and Jeroen de Heuvel round out the lineup, perfect craftsmen of a pop music that, while hinting at lo-fi and bedroom-pop affinities, moves swiftly towards a refinement steeped in passion and joie de vivre. As if the characters in these songs had been projected back into the 1950s, at the dawn of the sexual revolution and rock'n'roll.

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11/11/2019