Ah the summer. Slate-grey skies and more milk-bottle white coloured skin than we need to see, Brittas Bay and wonky ice cream vans, screaming kids and factor 10 sun tan lotion. This is what summer is for us Irish. The Little Ones, however are from a place where umbrellas are called parasols and surfers aren’t Sligo GAA players in their spare time – California. So if we rocky beach dwellers can’t quite connect with their Beach Boys inspired choral pop, we can’t be blamed for it.
Upbeat pop has lost its cheesy stigma this year with the successes of bands like Vampire Weekend and Born Ruffians loitering mixtapes with shiny-happy guitar lines, though with an underlying articulacy and attention to craft. The Little Ones offer a more carefree, cheery as an ice-cream-with-a-cherry-on-top spin on the calypso-infused power pop of the current American wave of upbeat songmakers. Boracay is a perfect example of how The Little Ones operate: major chord brilliance stroke over a faintly Britpoppish vocal line, some quite catchy hooks hover around, and you feel this niggling feeling in your cheeks that you sometimes feel when you experience that emotion they call ‘happiness’. But then that’s it. They don’t transcend, they don’t push past the beach into the deep blue Pacific ocean, and they don’t adventure into unknown territory.
Gregory’s Chant sparkles from behind sunglasses and effervesces from the “Ah!” to “Oh!” chorus. Everybody’s Up To Something is propelled by a piano to a climactic break (although it does tread on dodgy Kaiser Chief’s territory to get there). Waltz meanders around a more melancholic oompah-pah than the rest of the album, in contradiction to their mission statement of making every song upbeat enough to make your dimples cave in and your feet blistered from dancing. Perhaps the band might have considered allowing their debut a few more “Waltzes” for variety; there is so much sunshine packed into Morning Tide you’ll be running a risk of violent sunburn by the end of it all.
