The Pretty's
Empty Heads (Independent)

Hailing, according to Facebook, from the Prickly Peaches Retirement Home, the Pretty’s have manfully stepped up to the plate in the absence of any other half (or fully) decent new garage bands in their real hometown (Vancouver). You have to be a real dipshit to get this kind of thing wrong—three chords, vintage gear, bad breath, that’s all it takes—but you also need a special something extra to do it good. The Pretty’s could coast on their fundamental decency as players, their basic indecency as human beings (or so I’m assuming, from the promo shots), and their rather striking performances at the last two editions of Keithmas. Or they could just coast on the decisively snotty groove established on the first two tracks of their debut album, “Kayla the Kat Killer” and “Half Gram Blues”.

But then something miraculous happens, or “Angry Horizon” happens, more specifically, and entirely new vistas of musicality seem to unfold right before our very ears. This oddly endearing quality—let’s call it “ambition”—continues all the way through the rest of this damn thing, coming perhaps to its fullest fruition on the love letter to CIA–sponsored mind-control cults, “People’s Temple”. It’s enough to bring a tear to your eye, but then again, so is a baseball bat to the nuts.

In fairness, the opening line of this review is a little disingenuous. There are still lots of great garage rockers kicking up a racket in Vancouver, but they’re outnumbered by pretentious twats with iPads mistakenly self-identifying as “musicians”. So, in conclusion: great record!