Unabashed pop music often gets a bad rap. If an album isn’t agonizingly serious or spends its time navel-gazing about society’s foibles, it’s not important. If it’s not important, then it’s immediately dismissed. If that’s the case, Vancougar’s Canadian Tuxedo will never be liked by the dour kids with frowns pasted on their faces–it’s obviously meant for their friends partying in jean jackets.
The band’s instrumentation is a gumbo of garage rock, pop-punk and a dash of the ’50s girl group sensibilities thrown in for a little bit something extra. Bubbly synths spill over the distorted bass and simple three-to-four chord guitar parts. In the age of increasingly complex instrumentation by bands with members numbering in the double digits, to hear a straight-up quartet with a little less pretension is a much-needed break.
It’s pretty clear when tracks like “Obvious”–which features such insightful lyrics like, “It’s so obvious to me/we were meant to be alone”–that the band isn’t going to write illuminating tracks about the human condition. These are the indie equivalent of the karaoke sing-a-longs for the recently broken up–not that it’s a bad thing. In the age of needlessly self-serious bands, a group so imminently accessible and joyous like Vancougar is nice break from the drudgery of the dirges.