IN THE DOLL HOUSE (BY) DANDY LIONS

Indie / Pop / Gypsy Folk
2011, Self Released
Free Download: Bandcamp, last.fm

I'm always a sucker for male/female vocals, so I wasn't terribly surprised to find the Dandy Lion's songs frequently getting stuck in my head.  It's not particularly rare to find indie bands with dual male/female vocals these days, but few bands have such an instinctive knack for shaping songs around the strengths of those vocalists.  The brother/sister songwriters behind Dandy Lions — Dante and Lena DeLeo, joined by drummer Ben Goldstein and bassist John Feliciano — don't have the typical voices you'd expect from such a duo, either.  Their deep, forceful vocals and stretchy tricks of enunciation add to the unique vibe of this ethereal baroque pop, music that isn't afraid to wear its oddness on its sleeve even as it pushes an unashamed, unpretentious reliance on melody.

At first, I just accepted that the Dandy Lions were going to be much poppier than the dreary stuff I normally listen to.  While never depressing, the music is a bit moody — not melodramatic, and less stiff and awkward than other baroque sounding stuff, but there's a bit of a haunted edge creeping in.  Songs often come unhinged without warning, devolving into a chorus of shouts and frantic instrumentation, adding an off-kilter sense of unpredictability to what starts out as bouncy upbeat indie-folk. It's frenetic pop music with a surreal edge. Some bands successfully pull off quirk, and plenty of bands succeed with catchy accessibility, but both at once is a much rarer feat. The duality that forms the basis for the Dandy Lion's music somehow allows them to be both — accessible, and yet weird enough that you can't quite pin down whether you've heard anything like it before.

The vocals of the singers – which are themselves just a bit different, and yet entirely natural when balancing each other — provide the backbone. Dandy Lions take excellent advantage of the back-and-forth, male-and-female style, writing songs that compliment both voices, rather than just using one as seasoning for the other.  It's fine that most bands with male/female singers write like that: one vocalist dominant, the other joining here and there as a sort of lyrical accent. But these siblings' voices are a perfect fit, and their dependence on this good fortune shapes the album, giving it a sense of confidence and sincerity, a refreshing lack of cynicism and calculated aloofness.  Many recent indie bands passive-aggressively embrace their pop aspects, combining semi-catchy melodies with a stuffy twee sensibility that runs the risk of making the music feel stilted, and distant.  With the Dandy Lions, there's no awkward over-instrumentation or insecure dancing around the band's poppy nature. Everything contributes: those complimentary dual vocals, the forceful rhythm section, the rarely-dominant but never-superfluous accordion, which compliments the guitar with a similar playful back-and-forth as the musician's vocals, neither one truly leading the other. Goldstein and Feliciano provide genuine, pounding energy to match, pushing the music along at a speed that prevents any chance of it all seeming too-cute.

Bands that focus on melody often focus only on melody, which usually leads to me quickly losing interest.  Melody creates catchyness, but melody itself generally doesn't contribute to texture or depth. If the Dandy Lions didn't have a distinct personality — a moody duality and an off-center sense of unpredictability — they would be just another redundancy in the recent surge of quirky indie-pop bands, bands that make up for a lack of interesting songwriting by copping interesting musical trends. But nothing here is trying to be trendy, cute, or desperately different. Dandy Lions let their music carry itself with the confidence that their songwriting is interesting — and it is — rather than propping it up with splatters of semi-interesting flair to support a limp essence. Quirky charm like this works as well as it does because the band — for all their skill — gracefully lacks pretension.