Charly Bliss, New York’s gleaming power-pop gem, has been taunting us for years. Since releasing the addictive three-song EP Soft Serve in 2014, the band has toured with Veruca Salt and opened for Sleater-Kinney, and received career-boosting praise from all the usual music media suspects, from Pitchfork and The A.V. Club to The Fader and Stereogum.
But the band’s follow-ups came in single-song fits and starts. “Ruby,” a fuzzy, vulnerable track with a Weezer-worthy guitar solo, came in May 2016, and “Turd” dropped (hehe), fittingly, in November, just after Donald Trump won the presidential election. Listening (and pogoing along) to Charly Bliss for more than 20 minutes without repeating a song was frustratingly impossible.
But on April 21, the band’s debut full-length Guppy arrived. And it is as fun and confessional as a giggle-filled sleepover fueled by gummy candy and whatever swigs of booze could be sneaked out of the parents’ liquor cabinet at 2 a.m. So when Charly Bliss’ singer-guitarist Eva Hendricks answered the phone about a week before the band’s stop in Nashville, I only had one question: “What the hell took you so long?”
“Well, we recorded the record twice,” she explains, letting out a little laugh. “That was part of it. We recorded the record for the first time at the beginning of 2015 … around when we really started touring a lot. It helped us realize what type of band we were. We are an indie-rock band for sure, but I think we also realized we’re a pop band.”
So the group ditched its plans to focus strictly on garage rock, and embraced their upbeat offerings. And thank God for that. Guppy, released via Seattle’s Barsuk Records, is one of the best pop records of the year, rightfully drawing comparisons to Veruca Salt, The Rentals, Weezer and other acts whose pop songcraft has proven to age well as decades pass. With Hendricks’ bandmates — Dan Shure, Spencer Fox and her older brother Sam Hendricks — filling the songs with syrupy harmonies and huge, energizing, engulfing hooks, it’s not an album you can put on as background music.
In opening track “Percolator,” Eva Hendricks squeaks like Cristin Milioti’s character from 30 Rock (“I’m a very sexy baby!”), singing: “Don’t you know I aim to please? / I’m everybody’s favorite tease / Put your hand on my knee / That’s what friends are for.” At face value, the song leans toward obnoxiously flirty, but Hendricks winks and shrugs throughout, delivering biting one-liners with an offhand coolness as if to say, “Sure dude, whatever.” Other times, her brutality isn’t as subtle — she kicks off the song “DQ” by admitting that she “laughed when your dog died.” Ouch.
“A lot of people have been saying that the lyrics are really dark, and I agree,” Hendricks says. “I think a lot of the time I’m making fun of myself. I’m presenting this exaggerated version of myself. I’ve been thinking a lot about it since everyone’s been writing, ‘Oh it’s really happy and really dark.’ It’s a funny reflection of my own personality in a way — I come across to people as very bubbly, and I am. But I think I’m both things.”
And the more you listen, the more you start to feel the bite. As fun a ride as it is, Guppy is also packed with years’ worth of hard-learned lessons. I tell Hendricks that especially on songs like “Glitter” and “Totalizer,” she sings as though she’s staring down every single person who’s ever said something shitty to her and telling them to fuck right off. It seems I hit the nail on the head.
“Yes, totally!” she responds. “Growing up, everyone would always say to me like, ‘Oh you can’t be so nice to people,’ or, ‘You can’t act so excited around this boy, he’s going to think you like him.’ Finally I was like, ‘That is so ridiculous!’ It’s my fault for being nice to somebody? C’mon. All of that stuff, I think came through in the record. So many of the lyrics are ‘fuck you.’ It’s just about growing up and experiencing my early 20s and all of the crazy emotional yo-yoing that kind of coincides with that.”
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