Back after a four-year hiatus but sounding as if they haven’t missed a beat, Blonde Otter gives us “Your Number”, a characteristically cool mix of angular power pop, anthemic 80s new wave, and the growl of garage rock, and their trick to staying ahead of the curve seems to be a simple, effective, yet much-overlooked one. If you don’t tie yourself down to any one scene or sound or style, then the passing of time can’t age you. Or, put another way, you can’t go out of fashion if you were never in fashion in the first place.
Instead, “Your Number” shows that here we have a band happy to plunder timelines, eras, genres, and geographies from all over the musical map, past and present, to find the core grooves and sonic moves that they weave together to create their signature sound.
This, well, let’s call it a comeback single, is a magical mix of raw 2000s indie-rock guitars and angular post-punkery, all polished with pop accessibility and polished with synth sheens. If you wanted to do one of those clichéd journalistic go-tos, imagine The Strokes having a sonic sparing match with Talking Heads while LCD Soundsystem plays the background music — loudly.
There will be many who were sorry to see the band disappear from the radar in the first place, but the silver lining is this: if they hadn’t gone away, then they wouldn’t have been able to come back so impressively. That’s how I chose to view it, anyway. It’s like taking the long pause and intake of breath before you hit the high note.
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