(from beat-sketching, July '03) / home / reviews index
Tender Trap –
‘Film Molecules’ (Fortuna Pop!)
The Tender Trap debut, released last year, contains thirteen very different
songs, each another enticing slice of narrative pop. Pop songs about
pop music by an underground band; not such an odd combination. The Top
40 singles charts disprove the notion that history is created by the
observers – they're a record of what has been most popular, not
what’s been most influential (see that old Velvet Underground quote
that not many people bought their records, but everybody who did formed
their own new band) or what’s most defined the era of its time.
Tender Trap's Amelia Fletcher is something of the voice of an indie,
C86 generation, which influenced today's most British underground guitar
bands no end, and just as you could never take the voice out of this
girl, you could never take the girl out of this voice. There's a real
freshness and enthusiasm here - simplicity can mean direct instead
of 'twee' - even in its complexity.
Joined by former Heavenly / Marine Research accomplices Rob Pursey and
DJ Downfall, it's another rare thing, a band of musicians taking a real
interest in pop craftsmanship. So, sequenced vocals introduce 'That
Girl', its cartoonish rhythms giving way to its sophisticated, unwinding
flipside 'Talk In Song'. There's almost throwaway fun ('Chemical Reaction')
and shiny pop nous that stands up to the Magnetic Fields ('Son of Dorian
Gray'). 'Emma’'s mournful bass is displaced by the full 50-second
punk blast of ‘Dyspraxic’; it fits perfectly and excitingly,
pushing synthetic electro-pop into punk drumming, as a great pop album.
Pop is a mixture. This is perfect pop.
