DIRTY MITTENS, Pinky Swear (self-released)

[July 16th, 2008]

[MOTOWN-TINGED INDIE-POP] It takes a few minutes into “The Small Things,” the first song on cute-pop band Dirty Mittens’ new five-song EP, Pinky Swear, to realize that not everything is as peachy as it seems. It starts out as a pristine slice of ’60s nostalgia, filled with shuffling guitar, organ and a swinging horn section, until singer (and former WW intern) Chelsea Morrisey slyly drops a bomb during the second verse: “If a hard truth applies to you,” she sings, “that I had love/ And I lost love.” Yup—don’t dare call this a twee record.

Whereas older Mittens material survived on Beat Happening-esque simplicity and Morrisey’s astute lyrics, the new EP showcases a fleshed-out sound, drawing as many cues from vintage Motown (that horn section!) as it does indie-pop. It also sounds almost uncannily like the Concretes’ near-perfect self-titled debut.

Like former Concretes singer Victoria Bergsman, Morrisey has a real knack for first-person songwriting. The album stumbles from back porches to city streets, broken pleas to outlying docks. But when Morrisey deviates—especially on “Amelia,” a lament from the perspective of the ill-fated pilot Amelia Earhart’s father—the details are just as rich. And the sound just as infectious.

Though the record is gorgeously layered, it never feels cloying. Dirty Mittens wisely decides to keep some things simple—most evident in the record’s light-as-a-summer-breeze choruses, especially the repeated mantra “It’s hard it’s hard/ To see your eyes/ When you got weeds growing up” on “The Small Things,” and the simple onomatopoeia of “boom boom boom” that “Amelia” offers.

More than anything, Pinky Swear works because it manages to do the unthinkable: make awkward situations catchy and, oddly enough, endearing. When Morrisey says, amid a layer of backward keys and glockenspiel, “I’ll sit at home and wait for the city to scare you back to me,” you don’t just feel the weight of her voice—you know exactly what she means.