Hotter (Independent)

For those who pine for the days when low-tech guitars and live drums ruled the stage, Lisa’s Hotcakes has your back, as well as a sophomore EP that lives up to its Hotter moniker. Released this past October, it’s a six-track stomper that sees the local quartet fine-tuning its pink-raw sound, but just a touch.

The garage-pop lovers in Lisa’s Hotcakes are not maestros or virtuosos, but they don’t pretend to be, and that’s part of their simple charm. Determinedly owning their lo-fi aspirations, the band is just four femmes fatales jamming to their hearts’ content. And content they are to bang out hook after softly barbed hook.

In “We Have Only Begun”, vocalist Gisele da Silva departs from her usually husky croon, singing in a voice as light and sweet as cotton candy, contrasting nicely with a bummer-rock riff. Meanwhile, in the ’90s-alt serenade “Bullet”, Véronique Noelle’s six-string solo ebbs and flows like sun-flecked surf.

Making up for the clunker “Hotcakes Army”, “Under the Midnight Moon” paints dreamy imagery with guitar licks intertwining like shafts of dusty moonlight. And closing with “If I Have Not Love”, where da Silva’s shadow-deep voice really glows, bracing drums and foreboding bass build into an amp-washed anthem declaring, “I am a noisy gong clanging simple”—a fitting mantra for Lisa’s Hotcakes.