A light-hearted tug-of-war with no better-or-worse wager and no bleeding-heart antics, Marlovers’ “A Rainy Day in the Moon” is a warm, welcoming, and occasionally goofy take at the girl-boy indie duet.
I am happy to get acquainted with the indie-pop stylings of Mallorca-based band Marlovers today.
It’s easy to imagine how a first-listen, moment-of-truth handshake with even a single song – in this case the band’s buoyant first offering via Lilystars, “A Rainy Day in the Moon” – can turn one into a Curious George, if not a (moderately) cautious convert.
Propped on a sweet-and-rough bed of overdrive jangle, laid thick with angelic boy-girl unison singing, “A Rainy Day in the Moon” is a great gateway to the Spanish outfit’s brand of neo-indie.
If you’ve once swooned over Evan Dando and Juliana Hatfield dueling on “It’s About Time,” or if your heart broke into tiny little pieces upon spinning The Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Sometimes Always” – where Jim Reid and Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval do their damnedest-best star-crossed paramours – well, this isn’t exactly the same.
What it is, rather, is a light-hearted tug-of-war: there is no better-or-worse wager, no bleeding-heart antics. It’s akin to Moe Tucker having a go at the Velvets’ “I’m Sticking with You,” providing a warm, welcome, occasionally goofy, and very much organic reprieve from the mostly quantized output of modern pop.
The track was, as the band tells it, the last track laid down for the album, and it “came together very quickly,” faster than their usual pace. That flash of inspiration shows; there’s a looseness and immediacy to the song that explains why it “quickly became one of our favorites.”
Part of the charm, the band says, is in its rarity: Simó Reus and Marina Mullor share vocal duties here, something the band admits has only happened once before (on “Who’s to Blame?” from, incidentally, the same record). But above all, it’s a testament to the ability of dual voices to either sharpen or soften each other depending on mood, circumstance, and execution.
“It fits well with the themes we often explore: melancholy, longing, and the search for something lost,” the band says, adding that despite this, the opposite idiom – “a catchy, almost bright melody that encourages sing-alongs” – seems to work better.
“It’s not a dramatic change but rather a moment of clarity. It reminds us that our music can express both sadness and hope at once,” they say in the same pre-release statement.
Marlovers is an interesting deviation from the sure-footedness of other artists on this humble label’s roster, which prides itself in its same-y-but-different brand of singular curation. What they bring to the table, I think, is a mid-‘90s kind of resolve, a Gen X-era kind of malleability, and a post-hippie/pre-millennial refusal of artifice.
Sample their wares – and I pray there’s tons to come, because I sincerely dug this one – via “A Rainy Day in the Moon” today.