The person who told me to listen to Minneapolis’ Bad Bad Hats called them “the soundtrack of [her] summer”, and frankly I couldn’t agree more. Psychic Reader, BBH’s first full-length (on Afternoon Records, who also released their EP It Hurts in 2013), is a sparkly slice of indie pop that’s catchy without being obnoxious, deep without being demanding, energetic without being tiring. In other words, I’d gladly set this year’s John Hughes montage to one of these songs and call it a good scene.
Musically, Bad Bad Hats approach the power trio with an indie pop flair and not a small bit of the 90s. Singer/guitarist Kerry Alexander lists Alanis Morrisette, Kay Hanley, and Kim Deal as her primary songwriting influences and it shows; there’s more than a flash of The Breeders behind the slightly chunky guitar and forward, active bass (though her girlish vocals are closer to Pod-era Tanya Donnelly than Deal’s yawps) and her lyrics plumb the dysphoria of ambiguous relationships with the candor of Jagged Little Pill and the raw pop sheen of Aurora Gory Alice. Subtle synths fill in the gaps making a full-yet-airy sound, and sometimes it’s difficult to tell if Chris Hoge is using acoustic or electronic drums. The final feel is like the summer sun behind your crush’s head lighting up the halo of their hair- warm, pretty, ephemeral, exciting.
Songwise, Psychic Reader is a bit chameleonic. “Midway”, the opener, could be a gem Juliana Hatfield dropped between Sunburn and Rosy Jack World, its repeated “God, I could’ve kissed you” sticking straight into the angsty part of the brain; it’s immediately followed by the more raucous “Shame”, which half-borrows a riff from Nirvana (and adds a few guitar pyrotechnics, showing Alexander is a capable soloist as well). The record flirts with a number of stylistic choices from jaunty (“Fight Song”, “All-Nighter”) to mopey (“Joseph”, “Psychic Reader”) but keeps a round, polished production that keeps it all within well-defined bounds. The high point, though, is the beautifully under-produced “Things We Never Say”, a soft acoustic track that expresses the nebulous almost-relationship perfectly (“I never get tired of dreaming / it’s you I’m sleeping for”) and captures an intimacy that makes you feel like you climbed into her bedroom window.
If Psychic Reader has any issues they lie in the production, not the songs. That glossy, even sound has the tendency to make the songs a little too cohesive; the sharper parts that should be popping out because they’re aggressive are sanded down just a bit too much, the silkier sections get just a bit too much synth fill to properly shimmer. There are also some incomprehensible electronic noises peeking out here and there, most notably (and irritatingly) in “Shame”, which are only distracting and add no tangible plus to the songs or the sound. And in my traditional nit-picking, the bass is just a bit too far forward in the mix, so much so that the lyrics often get blurred by it. It’s a testament to Alexander’s songwriting skills that her compositions still shine through in spades. Edit: Turns out that my headphones simply have too much response for how my new music player app handles its output. The bass is fine.
Final Grade: A-. Psychic Reader is a damn fine indie-pop record with a couple small blemishes that are mostly forgivable. Afternoon Records is giving away the MP3s for free (link to them from BBH’s Bandcamp) and only charging for the vinyl or lossless WAV files, so go ahead and download it, but the tracks that’ll have you checking the tour schedule are “Things We Never Say”, “Midway”, and “Fight Song”.
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