free music friday: the langley sisters

It’s disappointing how little of the ’50s retro/girl-group revival has seen its musical proponents concentrate on sound as well as style. Thankfully London’s Langley Sisters, who’ve been touring with Paloma Faith this week, appear to be looking deeper than the uniform of puffball skirts, polkadots and pompadours to ensure that their music sounds as authentically timewarped as they look. Their debut single ‘Queen Bee’, produced by Ed Harcourt, is set for release in late October through Velvet Blue Music on limited edition white vinyl and digital download.

With its rippling piano and gloopily giddy vocals, ‘It’s Strange To Be In Love’ (also produced by Harcourt, but not on the single) initially feels as though it could have come skipping straight off the credits of a Doris Day movie. Dig deeper, however, and its lyrical references to the brain as a broken mirror with “pieces gone missing”, and frolicking in fields of withered poppies, suggest an intriguing pastiche of their chosen genre. Evoking love as psychosis, the song begins to scratch at the unsustainable instability and emotional repression that boiled beneath the socio-cultural surface of a decade which, like the song’s protagonists, is “destined to be extinct” and nonchalantly steering a course towards a disastrous denouement. Any scene with this soundtrack would have to show a bored, beehived housewife blissfully tripping on vodka and Valium while her husband dozes at the country club and her lover parks his motorbike against a white picket fence.

FREE MP3: The Langley Sisters, ‘It’s Strange To Be In Love’

visit The Langley Sisters on Myspace

Written by: Rhian Jones

Tags: the langley sisters

This entry was posted on Friday, September 18th, 2009 at 8:49 am and is filed under All A/V, free music friday. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.