Chad Taylor

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Can see what the fuss is about. I saw The Naked and Famous before I went away up on K Road somewhere and liked them a lot, and This Machine has been travelling with me since then. Although I liked that EP a lot too, I thought the songwriting stayed rather too faithful to the post-punk creed of repeating a sequence of notes until the audience just bloody admitted it was a melody, dammit, while the drummer marked time impatiently: hurry up n dance, plz? A germinal recording, in other words, or maybe simply German -- oddly, TNAF reminded me of D.A.F., the little sweethearts. But what The Naked and Famous did have as a group more than made up for what the Yeah Yeah Yeahs lacked when I caught them in London only a few months later. Watching Karen O demand that you love her on the off-beat caused me to remark to my ticket booker (Finn!) that I would have loved to see what The Naked and Famous could have done with the Brixton Academy's sound system, a performance-enhancing technology that was responsible for at least a third of the YYYs' entertainment value.

Maybe that will happen now. Passive Me Aggressive You has perfect timing, chiming as it does with the sparkly Dennis-Wilson-falling-downstairs aspirational visions of what I can only call Baby Prog: Neon Indian, MGMT, School of Seven Bells, Blonde Redhead, Animal Collective et al. Actual songs, babies, from the bedside hush of 'The Sun' to the LCD rush of 'All of This.' When I saw TNAF in Auckland the two singers were passing the baton - your turn, mine - but now they've worked things out; one takes the lead and the other follows up, the sentimental choral touches balancing the rat-a-tat-tat. 'Eyes' is on hi-rotate. 'Young Blood', in context, doesn't even stand out that much: another sign that they have a real album on their hands. And the bv's for 'No Way?' Big hugs.

Anyone with a working set of ears in NZ is raving about this. This is The Naked and Famous's Riverhead / Becoming X moment. Please, Gods of Alt - don't let them fuck it up...