Tuesday's Recommended Release

Fair or not just about any band featuring women and guitars will be compared to the Vivian Girls for quite some time. The latest to get these cheap shots are Wetdog, a band of London ladies being hailed as the UK's answer to Vivian Girls. Really there are only scant similarities on their latest release, Frauhaus!, like the lo-fi sounds, the use of garage rock guitars, and the steady rhythms, but these girls show off a lot more influences and styles than any of the lo-fi Brooklyn scenesters could ever hope to.

In listening to Frauhaus! I kept coming back to the thought that it sounds like a weird blending of The Raincoats and Deerhoof. Each song seems to alternate between straight garage rock anthems and quirky little ditties with keyboards and synths running right along with the guitars. The vocals also switch up, with more direct harmonies one minute followed by the stranger sort of sounds that remind us of Deerhoof's front lady Satomi Matsuzaki. The two sounds keep on taking turns giving Frauhaus! bit of a schizophrenic feel to it, rock one minute, the circus the next, but amazingly it does all somehow fit together to create an album that keeps you coming back for more and keeps revealing more layers at the same time.

Once you get past all the talk of lo-fi and Vivian Girls this record really proves to be a nice late year surprise. The songs are well structured even though they almost never follow any sort of conventional path. So let other people talk about how they are just copping a sound from another band, you'll know better and you'll be enjoying it all the way through any backlash.
Wetdog - "Tidy Up Your Bedroom"
Wetdog - "Snapper"