Allo Darlin'

The real revelation of this year's NYC Popfest came dyring the Friday night encore of Allo Darlin', from London. First, that there was an encore at all: the middle act on a five-band lineup playing its first New York show rarely gets that privilege. But for its allotted half-hour at Don Hill's, Allo Darlin' had been terrific, witty and heartfelt, like a less moody Belle & Sebastian.

And then, with grins all around, it concluded the encore with the frontwoman Elizabeth Morris and the bassist Bill Botting breaking out into "You're the One That I Want", from "Grease".

It was not a misfire, even though no one in Allo Darlin' wears a motorcycle jacket or openly worships the 1950s, or that almost the entirety of the crowd, teeming with vintage tote bags and librarian glasses, coudl have been drawn from the extras pool of "Ghost World". The choice made literal what was implicit throughout this often impressive festival: The pop ethic, survivor of many iterations, is mutable and agnostic and umembarrassed. - The New York Times Company

In April, Pitchfork's Nitsuh Abebe asked, "Have we reached some point where our knees jerk and we kick away anything any critic can write off as cutesy or 'twee' or associate with the wrong movies?" He had a point, of course. After a short burst of enchanting indie pop albums by Belle and Sebastian, Camera Obscura, the Boy Least Likely To, and many others in the mid-2000s, a cutesy sensibility has gone on to conquer the box office (Michael Cera, Zooey Deschanel) and the Billboard charts (Owl City). Faced with so much mainstream success, an anti-twee backlash was probably inevitable.

Sure enough, the last couple of years have seen the Lucksmiths break up, Los Campesinos! say adios to their glockenspiels, and Jens Lekman fall oh so silent. Younger indie poppers like the Pains of Being Pure at Heart and Vivian Girls ramp up the rickety distortion, while Swedish labels like Labrador, Service, and Sincerely Yours have expanded indie pop's sonic and conceptual palette far beyond C86 and Sarah Records. No-frills twee-pop definitely never went away, but few new bands lately have resonated much beyond the scene.

Say hello to Allo Darlin': a welcome reminder that any aversion to cutesy music in recent years may have been due not to the aesthetic, but the quality. The London-based foursome are firmly in the tradition of classic indie pop: Australian-born, ukulele-strumming singer Elizabeth Morris also plays in Tender Trap, the current band of Amelia Fletcher, an icon since her years in Talulah Gosh, Heavenly, and Marine Research, while bassist Bill Botting has backed former Hefner frontman Darren Hayman. The 10 songs on Allo Darlin's self-titled debut album, out in the UK on Fortuna Pop!, don't rewrite the formula for wistful bedsit charm as much as show that it can still be carried out masterfully.

Rather than the cloying infantilism of some twee bands, Allo Darlin' focuses its tunefulness on the simple pleasures and modest melancholies of young adulthood. With a flute solo and a John Hughes-inspired video, "The Polaroid Song" tackles wistful nostalgia but also sets the album's tone: "Feel like dancing on my own/ To a record that I do not know/ In a place I've never seen before." On "Silver Dollars", with chords strikingly reminiscent of Lekman's "Black Cab", Morris questions her career path and hopes one more gin and tonic will convince her romantic interest to leave with her at the end of the night. "Kiss Your Lips" ba-bas like Grease about salty-sweet kisses and Weezer's "El Scorcho", "Let's Go Swimming" puts Mazzy Star sinuousness behind imagery of a perfect day that "all the hipsters in Shoreditch couldn't style," and "Heartbeat Chili" quotes Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" for a kitchen-sink love story with fewer culinary accidents than Lekman's "Your Arms Around Me", but all of the sweetness.

The references continue-- a neurotic lover is no "Woody Allen"; a sensitive outcast in "If Loneliness Was Art" necessitates a mention of UK peers the Just Joans-- but as with the best pop, the overall effect more than justifies any clever borrowing. "My Heart Is a Drummer" rejects the notion of guilty pleasures over a chorus to which you can sing "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun". Opener "Dreaming", featuring a baritone vocal from Pipettes founder Monster Bobby, plays like an urbane update of Heavenly boy-girl duet "C Is the Heavenly Option". Which reminds me: In a year when the Hold Steady released a song about a seminal indie pop band, the twee sensibility doesn't really appear to be on the decline-- no matter how many how many jerks have twitchy knees. More likely, it's just getting started. - Pitchfork

A mirror ball spins patterns over the many bodies in The Lexington. Beautiful, sensitive and sophisticated looking indie girls are huddled together at the front of the crowd effervescing with excitement. Allo Darlin’ are celebrating their album launch tonight, there is much to be excited about.

These vigilantes of indie pop are four friends whose affinity for each other and their music is so apparent it’s a glorious communion for everyone both onstage and off. They are Elizabeth Morris, Paul ‘Thunder’ Rains, William Botting and Michael Collins, with a guest appearance from Johnny Helm of The Wave Pictures on shaker duty for extra percussive punch.

They open with ‘The Polaroid Song’ where Paul plays his guitar as if sound were light; his, molten sunlight bouncing on water. The room is instantly lifted and bones start to shake and jump as soon as the boys thump in their rhythms. This action continues until ‘Heart Beat Chilly’, where Paul and Elizabeth are left alone. Paul sits with his lap steel, seeming like a man of 400 years trapped in the body of a 25 year old. This love song is a sublime union of ukulele and lap steel, of melody and narrative, with homage to Johnny Cash thrown in to boot.

Michael’s drumming in the chorus of ‘My Heart is a Drummer’, the last in the set, sounds like a racehorse at full gallop, despite the fact that he never sat behind a kit before this new bunch got together, his handle on his sticks is impressive regardless.

Elizabeth graciously takes up the ukulele to sing the poignant ‘Tallulah’ for the encore before full band return and the moustachioed William Botting introduces ‘What Will Be Will Be’, with a solitary bass hook reminiscent of Lou Reed’s ‘Take a Walk on the Wild Side’.

Allo Darlin’ are like the good guys in an epic action adventure flick and Elizabeth Morris our heroine. Understated, a slip of a girl with holes in the toes of her tights, shoeless and beautiful she delivers their adventures in love, Paris, Australia and Sweden, creating moving pictures in words. Her voice invokes a bitter sweetness; yet she seems to relish each experience she shares. It would be foolhardy to underestimate her exceptional talent. Perhaps they’re here to save us all from the evil fame farms that spew out the talentless homogeny we suffer in the mainstream? - Artrocker

Allo Darlin’ is the performing name of the lovely and warming Elizabeth Morris (and accomplices), who moved to London from Australia in 2005. A few musical endeavours and quiet attempts at songwriting later, and she has become a new staple of London’s indie-pop carousel thanks to her prowess at crafting simple but thoroughly affecting and mature songs on the ukulele. If anything, it seems that the instrument’s pick-up-and-play accessibility has made the songs exactly that – accessible. Simplicity results in a clear, emotional and whimsical album. It’s almost too easy to call it twee.

Morris is affectionate to the city that bore the album, but constantly aware that there’s much more in the world to discover. The album’s most bittersweet moment, Let’s Go Swimming, goes beyond that inevitable twee tag to reveal something more plainly affecting. She beautifully describes a lake in Sweden and then reels off a list of London stereotypes that couldn’t possibly compare to it. “All of the hipsters in Shoreditch could never style it,” is the line that rings most truthfully here, but the whole song is lovingly rendered, caked in gliding slide guitar and feathery bass. A special recording.

Though inevitable comparisons to fellow Aussies The Lucksmiths and The Go-Betweens will undoubtedly accompany Allo Darlin’ wherever they are heard, they are possessive of something quite different to those bands. Having hailed partly from another country and inhabited London so roundly and fully (or so it sounds), they have the benefit of being able to step back from these locales and comment more widely on those themes of loneliness and inability to fit in.

The boldest of those themes, perhaps, is a sense that their professional endeavours are futile when they could be earning a packet doing something else. Not that you’d be worried about when they’re making it sound so wonderfully bright and easy. Kiss Your Lips is the twee template executed perfectly. Weighing up lyrical unease with musical joie de vivre is a sure-fire way to involve the listener, and the struggle of part-time musicians it ably references rings true.

Between the bounce of the lighter numbers and the ache of the sweet ones, there’s all manner of winningly realistic insights veiled underneath the music. This debut is a joy from beginning to end, a fully-formed talent at the first attempt – as rare as it is welcome. - BBC

Four songs into Allo Darlin’s debut album, frontwoman and songwriter Elizabeth Morris begins the joy-filled ‘Kiss Your Lips’ by telling of her and her paramour’s visit to a Parisian fairground, where after candyfloss and popcorn he decides to “prove to me your manliness” and win her a teddy bear. This, it must be admitted off the bat, is the sort of detail that still causes a lot of suspicion amongst many otherwise right-thinking folk. You could, if being uncharitable towards such things, also cite that Australian emigre Morris favours the ukelele, elsewhere on the album namechecks Motherwell indiepop heartbreakers the Just Joans and spends the rest of her musical life in a band, Tender Trap, with twee figurehead Amelia Fletcher. On the other hand, such guileless pop almost represents the true alternative in an increasingly sure of itself and its specific retro foibles, and the indie-pop scene, as the excellent recent album by their friends Standard Fare helped prove and the sleeper success of Indietracks Festival among other factors reinforces, is currently in particularly rude health.

Which is all very well, but you’ve still got to harbour the individual nous in order to step away from satchels and hairslides cliche. That’s just what Morris does, her playful but bittersweet lyrics finding a way to tell a story engagingly cut to the bitter quick with non-slushy sentiments intact. In that regard she makes a close lyrical approach cousin to Jens Lekman, an open hearted innocence parlayed into the language of love and loss and the musical accompaniment that isn’t afraid to head beyond usual jangle fare. Such lightness of touch enables Morris to find the right meaning in the smallest of detail. The flute solo bolstered ‘The Polaroid Song’ invokes the slow death of the titular camera film brand as a metaphor for the worries of a new relationship - “will we still look happy when we’re not so overexposed?” - while ‘Heartbeat Chilli’ prevaricates in the kitchen, and later in a lido observing the wrinkling of fingers in water, all the while waiting for the right romantic move to be made. That song also beautifully repurposes the first line from ‘Ring Of Fire’ as a chorus, the occasional drop-in of lyrical references – ‘What Will Be Will Be’ bases its chorus on ‘Que Sera Sera’, ‘Kiss Your Lips’ actually breaks into a gang vocal, fully cited steal from Weezer’s ‘El Scorcho’ – only seeming endearing.

Some have attempted to make links between Allo Darlin’ and Hefner, which goes so far in that they both share a confident loucheness of playing borne equally out of Jonathan Richman’s example, but by direct comparison this album comes across as sunnier and more optimistic about how relationships develop. ‘Dreaming’ pitches the conflicted emotions of Camera Obscura into a duet with Brighton scenester and Pipettes founder Monster Bobby, who especially for the occasion has approximated the baritone vocals of the Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt, a swooping, swooning pop morsel about the impulsive heart (“It’s freezing out here on the pavement, but here in your arms it’s heaven/I can wait for you now but not forever”) that finds room for a lap steel solo. The Go-Betweens go surf of ‘Woody Allen’ attempts to cast the stars and producer of their love story and comes out of it oddly favourable, not least through the line “sometimes it gets bad, (but) it never gets Bergman bad” and a triumphant ending of “Max von Sydow couldn’t play you”. Most impressively, ‘Let’s Go Swimming’ rewrites the Magnetic Fields’ ‘All The Umbrellas In London’ via Belle & Sebastian circa If You’re Feeling Sinister to create a seeming defiant portrait of a single quietly beautiful spot in time, hazy slide guitar and imagery of hanging out by a Swedish lake in high summer capturing a moment beyond the kens of “all the hipsters in Shoreditch… (and) all the bankers in Highgate”.

When we talk about records fit for summer, we mean one that evokes lazy, crazy days of warm sun by means of unhurried ease and glorious melody. Allo Darlin’ certainly do all that, and ‘The Polaroid Song”s appreciation of “dancing on my own to a record that I do not know in a place I’ve never seen before” pretty much nails it. Get it home, though, and there’s just as much to admire in the smart lyrical touch that belies any sort of scene connotations, a fine romance borne from catching hold of the little things. - The Line of Best Fit

The sheer joy of this band is something to behold, and in singer Elizabeth Morris they have something of a star. Her solo ballad turn silences the whole room – a yearning tale of old friends across the seas, new friends, the end of the summer, love letters… it’s not so much a break-up song as a farewell song, a celebration rather than a whinge. And that’s Allo Darlin’s secret – they’re 100% bouncing pop glee. Texas will love them. - The Fly

By far the cutest and most winsome bit of pop music in this week’s selection, this too could quite comfortably have claimed the first prize rosette in one of this year’s quieter weeks. Not least because hairslidey lyrics like ‘Feel like dancing on my own / To a record that I do not know / In a place I’ve never seen before’ capture my heart with an indie lasso and remind me that for all the dabbling I might do with men from Essex who call themselves Hervé or grown men who choose to call themselves toddlers and not even spell it properly - I am still a middle class girl from the only county with a royal prefix who spent all her teens yearning for a boy with curtains for hair who might pash off with me to Bandwagonesque. Disarmingly pretty - and as poignantly, plaintively sepia as the photographic format they are singing about. Go and listen here or we’ll have to have an ineffectual limp-wristed fight outside, because you don’t like songs about rapes in chalet parks. - Drowned in Sound

"This the best indiepop song for years - a battle of wits between a girl who like dancing to the Grease Megamix and her non-dancing, Fugazi-loving boyfriend. Extra points for its catchy gallop of trumpets and ukuleles." 17 July 2009 - Jude Rogers

As the Scala waves goodbye to one Australian act, (The Lucksmiths headline their final London show with a triumphant and tearful set of pop stompers), it also doffs its cap in welcoming fashion to another, the delightful Allo, Darlin. Led by the perennially lovelorn and bouncy Elizabeth Darlin, this four-piece combine the massive merits of lilting ukulele and dippy lyrics about Sandy and Danny from 'Grease' and how cooking chilli is like a blossoming romance. Indeed, musings on said foodstuffs bring the whole room to total silence in 'Heartbeat Chilli', with Darling's charming story alone holding the audience captive. An unexpected delight. - Daniel Ross

Some reviews are just so easy to write. Sometimes you hear something that's obviously so good that the problem is trying to decide which aspect is the most praiseworthy... It warms the heart to hear such simple, wonderful, quality pop like this. Simple, yet so hard to get right. She shows us you don't have to be clever-clever to be clever. Allo, Darlin' will, quite plainly, become, if not huge, then hugely popular with a great many people. - James G

This makes me so happy, it's all smiles and handclaps. Words and lyrics caught... without letting the ball bounce first. Pop cultural supercute figs squirt out over the room and no-one of us can hold back our joy. Elizabeth smiles, Will behind the bass smiles, Michael at the drums smiles and... nah, the guitarist isn't smiling but he's dead cool so it's alright. The music stumbles into musical classics, Dana Dragomir solos and pub madness. It's sort of everything at once, packed in the neatest melodies you've ever heard. Allo, Darlin' is your perfect happy drunkenness, with friends who've downloaded every TV series, heard every song worth hearing. It resembles Jens Lekman's quirkiness with his contemporary reflections - the difference here is that the Scandinavian gloom is completely absent. Holy crap, I'm still smiling!"

http://musikenligtjerry.blogspot.com/2009_08_01_archive.html - Jerry Boman

Quite the opposite of the raucous song you might expect, this twee blast of breezy pop hilariously reimagines brawny, hard-core punkster Rollins at a disco, inexplicably shaking his tattooed fist to an Abba record. Ace. - Velimir Ilic

Wow, it's like Hefner got a brass section and got cute too. So, swoony, south pacific splashed beach rock it is. Abba are sampled, irony is in play and you can dance to it, shit, I can dance to it, scary. Unlike the b-sides... "Dear Stephen Hawking", a shuffling physics lecture come relationship deconstruction that combines top pop with a brain attack. "Heartbeat Chilli" is proof that the lost Johnny Cash years were spent rumbling around with Viv Stanshall. IS IT ANY GOOD? It's lovely and, if there were any such thing these days, it'd be great if it was a number one smasheroo - http://www.unpeeled.net/singles.html

"Who was the biggest surprise at Cosy Den? Without a doubt Allo Darlin, who made the tiny space in Gula Villan explode. Handclaps, babababa's, guitars, absurdly energetic, a song called Woody Allen! How Elizabeth Darlin, who's also in lovely Tender Trap, has passed me by I don't even want to know! - SVT

Rarely have I been so won over by a band on very first impression, live that is, it happens all the time on record. It was so refreshing to see a band actually enjoying themselves instead of worrying about their hair, getting their cordless straightners out between verses to re-straighten yet again. Allo, Darlin' are no such band, instead a bundle of joy, pop as it should be. - http://fatandconfused.blogspot.com/2009/09/allo-darlin-henry-rollins-dont-dance.html

The title track is a gorgeous re-sexing of the Lucksmiths cute pop melodies and breezes past with a smile and a whistle and a skip in its step. Its gorgeously summery. Dear Stephen Hawking re-appropriates the twee coolness of Jens Lekman into a jiggly samba. It has his spiritual upbeatness, with some lyrical weight, in this case being about the particle accelerator at CERN. Finally you have Heartbeat Chilli; a sad uke beat interspersed with bits of Johnny Cash and lap steel to provide a country vibe. A rather lovely EP all round. - http://russellsmusicreviews.blogspot.com/

By rights, everyone should think that Elizabeth Darling is too clever for her own good. The fact her songs are life affirming nuggets of pop, therefore, should be cherished. Whereas the title track and 'Dear Stephen Hawkins' are full of life and zest, it's the mournful, Lucksmiths-y 'Heartbeat Chilli' which makes me happy. Full of couplets most bands would die for, the fact that it's a b-side shows that Darling has brilliant songs coming out of every orifice. - http://alayerofchips.blogspot.com/