Happy Families
New Forgetting
July 15 2013 (Sonic Cathedral)
8/10
Words: Dave Beech
It seems these days that the sonic evisceration of late 80s/early 90s noise/shoegaze scene is coming back a vengeance, more and more bands are harnessing the raw emotional power of bands such as The Jesus and Mary Chain and Spacemen 3 and giving it their own contemporary twist. One such band are the recently formed Happy Families who, despite having never played a live show before, are already releasing their début single.
Falling somewhere in between shoegaze and lo-fi, 'New Forgetting' is a delicious slice of understated production qualities and lethargic vocals from Lucia Rivero and while not completely indicative of the aforementioned bands, Happy Families are certainly underpinning their overall sound with a distinct layer of nostalgia that's never quite buried beneath the perpetual drone of Lawrence Chandler's (Bowry Electric) caustic guitar work.
Clocking it at just shy of four minutes, the single is the perfect length to encapsulate just what it is that Happy Families are about: bringing an older sound to a younger audience. The production qualities are never so archaic as to hamper the finished product, but manage to maintain an overt sense of texture and timbre, as if the song, once finished, was subject to musical sandblasting, stripping it of it's gloss and polish in order to uphold a generic convention that's paramount to the sound the band have gone for.
While their sound nothing new, Happy Families have instantly joined the already burgeoning ranks of shoegaze aficionados who are managing to repopularise a genre and aesthetic from almost 20 years ago. It's said that “pop will eat itself”, and this is almost the case with Happy Families, they've scoured record shops and obscure music listings and digested each and every morsel, no matter how obscure or short-lived and regurgitated it in to this cohesive, understated and utterly irresistible ode to the 90s. Brilliant stuff.
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