{"id":18673,"date":"2017-04-27T12:15:16","date_gmt":"2017-04-27T16:15:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/?p=18673"},"modified":"2018-08-09T17:07:06","modified_gmt":"2018-08-09T21:07:06","slug":"album-review-charly-bliss-guppy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/album-review-charly-bliss-guppy\/","title":{"rendered":"ALBUM REVIEW: Charly Bliss “Guppy”"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Photo by Jacqueline Harriet<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/p>\n

Brooklyn power-pop outfit Charly Bliss deals in the stylings of nineties\u2019 girl-fronted power pop bands: sugary sweet vocals layered over Warped Tour-worthy pop punk riffs. They haven\u2019t escaped comparisons to bands like Veruca Salt or Letters To Cleo, and they won\u2019t here either. But this niche of music – \u201cangry girl music of the indie rock persuasion,\u201d as described aptly in 10 Things I Hate About You<\/em>\u00a0– has received far less respect than it should have all these years.<\/p>\n

Any type of entertainment deemed \u201cgirly\u201d or otherwise dominated by young women gets treated with a shocking paucity of respect as art. Okay, maybe it’s not that shocking, given\u00a0the genre’s post-Nineties trend toward pre-packaged Disney-fication. What makes Charly Bliss so enticing is that they\u2019ve revived this style, adding their own dark humor and smarts to package it up for grown-ups. The macabre turns the lyrics can take balances out the sweetness of frontwoman Eva Hendricks\u2019 vocals. Paired together, they\u2019re brimming with irony and sarcasm – a Glossier-pink commentary on the reality of millennial womanhood.<\/p>\n

There are moments where they deal directly with specific issues modern women face, most notably on \u201cScare U\u201d when Hendricks sings \u201cI wanna talk about it \/ But I don\u2019t know what I mean \/ I don\u2019t wanna scare you \/ I don\u2019t wanna share you.\u201d This is such a familiar scenario – girl meets boy, girl and boy start hooking up, girl really likes boy but doesn\u2019t want to speak up about her emotional needs as to avoid appearing anything but \u201cchill,\u201d whatever that even means.<\/p>\n

But most of the sardonic wit, and underlying meaning, exists in more unexpected places, when Charly Bliss plays on the cutesy images and tropes of nineties power pop bands. \u201cRuby\u201d isn\u2019t about an ex-girlfriend or the most popular girl in school – it\u2019s about Hendricks\u2019 therapist, an ode thanking her for helping Hendricks overcome a fear of fainting in public. The track \u201cDQ\u201d isn\u2019t about ice cream – they kill off a dog in the first lines, and as a plot point in the song the restaurant doesn\u2019t become anything fun, but rather a dreaded dead-end on the path to adulthood.<\/p>\n

All in all, this album is a darkly comical twist on what you would expect an album with these sonic earmarks to broach. It showcases the real problems millennial women face; it\u2019s not all fuckbois and unanswered texts, but also serious neuroses and existential ennui. Like a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down, Charly Bliss makes us face the serious stuff with a facade of glossy pop punk.<\/p>\n