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One of the pleasures of reaching a certain age is that you get to watch young whipper snappers (on whose coolness radar you no longer even register as a faint bleep) become intoxicated by the music that was new and exciting when you were their age. As teenagers, it was rockabilly that many were discovering for the first time while their parents looked on with bemused indulgence. For today's teens, it's synth pop -- if Erasure were starting out in 2009, they wouldn't have to change much (if anything) about their sound in order to hit the charts. Michael John Hancock and Brian Robertson, who record together as Awesome New Republic, have caught the zeitgeist with a passion, and their full-length debut at times sounds like a tribute to bands like Yaz, Erasure, and Yello. "Whatever," the album opener, comes on like a manifesto, with its blippy synth lines, thumping mod-disco beat, plastic handclaps, and ecstatically heartbroken falsetto vocals; "Dances When" follows up with a particularly Erasure-like groove, nice but not quite transcendent. The vocal harmonies on "Birthday" are especially attractive, and the acoustic-based "Digital Eworld" offers a nice textural change-up, whereas the more rockish "Wheels, No Engines" (which features a near-Springsteenian glockenspiel) falls rather flat. Not every track here feels fully realized or manages to generate all the energy it was clearly meant to, but taken as a whole this album is a solid achievement. If Hearts turns out to be Awesome New Republic's weakest release, then they're in for a rewarding career indeed.
Condition:NEW. Punched upc
TRACK LISTINGS
Disc 1
1 Whatever (3:27)
2 Dances When (2:52)
3 Alleycat (3:00)
4 Birthday (3:15)
5 Digital World (3:06)
6 Footstomping Decay (2:24)
7 Dark Water (3:38)
8 Deep Love (2:56)
9 Last Drop (3:34)
10 Wheels, No Engines (3:22)
11 Hearts (4:12)
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