- When anyone talks about The Double Happiness they always have a bit of fun right at the get-go letting off a description of their splintery-genre-explosion like a party-popper. “ alternative-spooky-surf-spaghetti-western-pop” was the last one I heard or you could just as easily go with “spooky-Tiki-surf-reverb-post-punk” . You get the idea and the band are worth it. The veteran team of Meg and Simon Welchman, Kristin (Black) Fergusson, Peter Fergusson know their stylish rock history, deploying a list of influences -The Go Betweens, DIIV, Stereolab, Nancy & Lee, Sonic Youth, Look Blue Go Purple, Ultra Material- that are, well they’re probably just a bit more stylish than yours, aren’t they? The band themselves have their own little footnotes in music history, which are venerable enough to actually be quite difficult to find on the internet. If you look hard enough however you’ll find roots trailing back enough to bands like The Fugitive Microbes and Splat Acrobat and some surprisingly strong artistic echoes of where The Double Happiness are at now.
After all that name-dropping you probably want to know where that is, right? Their debut EP, City, will clue you in fairly quickly. Having said that, given the smorgasbord of stylistic options the band have given themselves the meld they settle on may not be exactly what you’re expecting. The energetic and tuneful Dick Dale riffs are only to be expected and they meet with the glum post-punk apathy like patchy sunshowers. It’s a great juxtaposition and is the bedrock of the band’s appeal, to me at least.
There’s more to it than that though and some of it I’ve been a bit surprised by. To begin with, the band members -all from the more DIY end of the spectrum- impart an unexpectedly Flying Nun / Chapter Music jangle to everything they do, throwing The Chills or The Twerps into the already crowded genre shredder.
In addition the band dig into a variety of elements from the shoegaze / dreampop playbook. Most specifically Kristin’s murmured vocals and the reverb that gets dolloped on every song. It takes a sound that is by turns energetically enthusiastic and drearily depressed and adds ghostly to every mood; weird! It sometimes feels like you’re listening to the echo of a band that’s no longer there, or forensically reconstructing songs after the fact. On balance it seems like punters will either ironically gravitate to such an obliquely stylish approach, or not get it by about a million miles. I suppose you could characterise that as the essence of true indie-rock.
You may know that Double Happiness is a Mandarin symbol referring to marriage. Thus it’s quite apropos for the band, whose members fall neatly into two couples, sure, but it’s undeniably more so because of the great big, strange sad-happy embrace of styles that they bring together. I hear that marriages don’t last as long as they used to, and your mileage with City may vary, but I certainly won’t forget my time with this quirky relationship pile-up any time soon.
- Chris Cobcroft.