I want you to stop for a moment, and just Think. Now, take your conception of what the term ‘pop’ means nowadays - groomed and liposuctioned airheads prancing in synchrony to indentikit backing tracks, or past-their-prime relics retreading the old ideas in a new outfit, or black-clad hollow-cheeked pseudo-rebels with a season ticket for Toni&Guy - and stamp on it. Seriously, batter the crap out of it, then jump up and down on the bits. You see, Lovvers play pop. No one else.
Think is seven tracks in just over twelve minutes. Think is relentlessly lo-fi production, sounding as if it could have been recorded in a room the size of a shipping container using equipment boosted from Cash Converters and a closing-down sale at Tandy. Think is punk rock in a way that the designer-labelled clones who claim the term as their own will never conceive of. Lovvers are the UK’s leading lights of lo-fi garage, and - to hear their tracks - you’d never imagine they knew it.
Think is something that too few albums are: it’s pure joyous fun, a riotous racket of three-chord scratch-outs, rattling drums and phonebox-bandwidth vocals as Lovvers recapture the unpolished DIY vibe of punk and strip it of the dumb violence and posturing. Each song consists of one or two silly little hooks or melodies that will stick in your ears for hours afterwards, almost infuriating in their simplistic tenacity. But you’ve been trained well by the bastions of broadcast media - there’s no way something this rough and ready and carefree can actually be good, be worth listening to.
But it is - it’s everything that guitar music should be, in fact. Think is the first record I’ve heard in ages that instantly made me want to jump around drunk in front of four equally drunk guys battering the hell out of musical instruments. It sounds alive; it sounds real; listening to Lovvers is like watching arthouse cinema after a relentless diet of CGI blockbuster crap and realising that, actually, you could do without ever seeing another rich guy with personality issues dressing up with his pants outside his tights ever again.
Lovvers have just become my new metric for assessing people’s understanding of what music is actually for. It’s a simple test - if you don’t love Think, you haven’t got a fucking clue.
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