I’m back from a short mid-week holiday to celebrate my mom’s birthday. It was great to connect with family again and now I’m preparing for a return to work tomorrow. But first, one last fun thing must happen – a music review!
Disc 1584 is…. Self-Titled
Artist: Wet Leg
Year of Release: 2022
What’s up with the Cover? Side hug! Because sometimes a full front-to-front hug is too much.
How I Came To Know It: I heard the song “Chaise Longue” on a “best new songs” list at Paste Magazine many months ago. I liked it and kept an eye out for the band to release a full album. It took forever but at last, here it is!
How It Stacks Up: There is only one Wet Leg album and this is it, so no stacking up.
Ratings: 4 stars
Wet Leg’s debut record is a perfect summer fun album, full of all the silly joy that a good summer’s day holds, and all the sunburn of regret from any flings that went sideways along the way.
As you might expect from such a record, there is not a lot of deep philosophizing. This is fun pop music that is to easy to digest and full of hooks that are much harder to write and produce than will appear on first blush. Delivering catchy pop tunes like Wet Leg members Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers manage here may appear to be easy breezy, but it is damned hard work.
Often with young ingenues I will talk about how they are old souls, but these two feel very much like young souls. Young souls are also great, because they are filled with breathless enthusiasm. That enthusiasm is infectious, and makes you feel young again just by listening. Wet Leg takes your ears and mind on a journey of sound that will make you want to dance, or at the very least rock your head back and forth and smile at the sky.
The record features a plethora of clever turns of phrase, typically linked up with a catchy bass hook that makes the words an extra step more clever than they actually are. From “Chaise Longue”:
“Is your muffin buttered?
Would you like us to
assign someone to butter your muffin?”
Do we know what this means? We do not, but it is pop gold and nigh impossible to resist singing along once you’ve got the timing down well enough to not flub it (the music on this record is notable for its well-timed phrasing).
Or sometimes the lyrics are even more simple and straightforward, like this from “Angelica”:
“I don’t even know
what I’m even doing here.
I was told that
there would be free beer.”
Aah, I remember the days when a party could draw people simply by advertising there would be a complimentary keg in the garage, and plastic cups a-plenty. Nowadays I’m more likely to get sidelong glances telling people to BYOB but what can I say? I’m old school.
“Chaise Longue” made them famous, but as anyone who starts to get to know this record will tell you, ““Wet Dream” is the better song.” Indeed it is, with a killer driving riff and the well-placed hand claps that are the sugar high of many a sing-a-long pop hit.
There are some bummer tunes, of course. As noted previously, no summer is complete without a bit of a late-day bummer where you can clink your beer bottles and cheer ‘c’est la vie’ to one another as the setting sun shines through the amber glass. There are a couple of grade A entries here. “Loving You” and “Piece of Shit” are both brilliant and sad little “fuck you” post-break up songs. The well-placed swear words on these songs feels vigorous and deliberate; the kind of swearing one engages in when the words are still relatively new and exciting. As a long-time swear veteran, I miss that.
Because this album is so sugary and fun (even in its dark moments) I set out determined to give it 3 stars. However, when I got to the end of this review I realized I’d put 6 of the 12 tunes in the “best tracks” section below. If half the album are its best tracks, that’s a 4-star album. So yes, this record is excellent. Maybe it won’t make you discover some deeper inner truth, but it might help get you back in touch with the wild and wonderful feeling of being young, and maybe even get you dancing along the way.
Best tracks: Chaise Longue, Angelica, Wet Dream, Loving You, Ur Mom, Piece of Shit
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