Words: Alex Rednaxela
How much you’ll fall for Soda Blonde depends entirely on how much Faye O’Rourke convinces you to fall for her power pixie of sequins and sorrow. She fits the ready glitz of melodic power pop like the shining disco ball of a smoking jacket cut to her figure for their show at Hackney’s Paper Dress Vintage.
With the cutting emotion of Annie Lennox and a rare full-bodied vocal understated like the best of Linda Ronstadt, she commands with vulnerability as the band’s front-and-centre starlet. This in stark contrast to a few hours earlier when we’d shared beers over a microphone. Both she and band member Adam O’Regan were “dressed down” and more instantly recognisable to this fan of the now-defunct project Little Green Cars. An Irish answer to the Fleet Foxes, ‘Cars began as a folky celebration of the muted and macabre - all moody moors and gloomy groundwater delivered with vocal harmonies and punchy lyrics. They announced its permanent scrapping earlier this year to an ‘emotional outpouring’ from the fans that Adam says they ‘didn’t really expect’. Both speak of a change in the music - finding a new direction across the ‘two and a half years’ given to recording Little Green Cars’ third album where they just ‘wrote and wrote and wrote and recorded and recorded and recorded’. I would argue a pop trajectory was evident long before they officially gave the Car to scrap. Their 2015 release Easier Day is to 2012’s The John Wayne as Black Sabbath is to Polka Tulk. The dull browns of trench coats and hunting dogs in the earlier track’s music video had given way to the neon soul of Tokyo only three years later. The ‘new wave of positivity’ they’ve experienced since re-forming as Soda Blonde is less surprising to me, then, than it seemed to both of my interviewees.
The show in Hackney last Tuesday (Faye asked us to imagine Saturday) was their first in London since reinvention. As Little Green Cars, their American labels’ ‘strategy’ had just been to ‘tour the states,’ and they speak eagerly of European prospects thanks to their newfound commercial freedom. ‘We did one tour… [of Europe]’
- ‘Two, but they were small.’
- ‘Yes, they were small, but I remember the first one that we did was so amazing - like - y’know, there’s so much culture and history to it that just isn’t obviously… I’m not going to naysay America…’
- ‘You can naysay America, it’s fine!’
- ‘Yeah, no, well, we’re really eager to do some European touring.’
Both swigged at free Coronas and shared private thoughts about label pressure. Good news followed: ‘there’s new songs that are coming…’ and Faye ‘would say that there will be a lengthy piece of work released in 2020.’
- ‘We’ve got a lot to say and a lot to give, so it’ll be coming.’
What they gave later that evening was proof for pots of gold at the ends of rainbows. a
After a lacklustre opener from London outfit Apidae, Soda Blonde were a vision in hair wax and pop austerity. The backing an unsmiling three-piece, they played the short set as their Terrible Hands characters - all mawkish sex and unspoken desires. Two of the three lost their colour-synced dinner jackets somewhere between the (as yet unreleased) ‘things we say in the heat of the night’ and ‘never been so bound to anybody like you’ either as part of the act or simply because the crowd worked up a sweat despite their average age. Fay carried her band’s commendable musicianship in self-conscious spotlight - all of the limited directional lighting trained on her hip-shaking, mic-caressing yo-yo of a performance from beginning to end. At once imperatorial and skittish, the layer of her physicality lifts vocals already aching with emotion to an even greater every-woman resonance. As Adam had put earlier - ‘Fay has come into herself more as a songwriter… there’s an empowerment… confidence… it feels strong, to me.’ She is clear engine for the entire outfit, but that’s not to say a Little Pop Car doesn’t need strong chassis and wheelbase to fly. Halfway through the set and with guitar in hand, Fay announced a song written earlier that day. Whether symptomatic of their current material dearth or experimentation with simpler sounds, the stripped back number she strummed out alone got lost among the Paper Dress’ titular Vintage clothing. Soda Blonde function at their best in concert - the band’s tight powerbase of catchy riffs and starched-shirt precision required garden for Fay’s rose. Their closing number was just such a Blonde H-bombshell - an explosion of vocal and instrumental energy enough to see the terribly serious gents in my surrounds kick into gear and spill their dark stouts. When it was over, the band took bows and slunk into the dressing room as a four-piece, heads hung as though ashamed by the well of emotion they had unmasked on the stage.
They’re ‘doing Live at Leeds’ next year - something I agree is ‘really exciting’. Fay asks that you ‘come to all the shows, go to the website, sign up to the mailing list…’ - as Adam said: they’re ‘certainly not opposed to any sort of help’.
- ‘And money,’ Fay puts in. ‘Anyone who’s listening, please send us money.’
- ‘Please do… follow us on all our social media things @sodablonde. And put that money thing there at the end.’
Pots of gold apparently not available for use by their guardians.
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