The Blow - The Blow

It’s easy to compare records to each other, but sometimes it’s more precise to compare certain albums to other media. So the closest thing The Blow’s self-titled resembles is the Zooey Deschanel-starring television show New Girl. Whether that sounds interesting or off-putting will most likely correlate with how you might feel about ‘The Blow’. It’s overtly quirky, and trying far too hard to be cute, but occasionally it comes close to working. The Portland-based indie pop band are going for a quaint sound that perfectly matches the ongoing ‘qt’ adventures of Deschanel’s character, and just like the show, it’s initially alluring but quickly falls flat on its deceivingly perfect little face.

The half baked instrumentals do nothing but bring down some potentially great songs. The cheap midi sounding instrumentals don’t carry a lot of weight, but sometimes they’re more than enough to provide a passable backdrop for vocalist Khaela Maricich’s inconsistent lyrics.

Singing about painfully normal things, the lyrics range from smart commentary to mind-numbingly dull brain farts. On ‘Like Girls’ Maricich mumbles ‘He wants to talk to you cause you’re a girl and he likes girls’, coming across as the type of deliberately quirky dialogue that wouldn’t seem too out of place in a Wes Anderson film.

The Etsy meets Soundcloud approach will surely appeal to some, but it’s also one of the easiest to hate sounds in a good while. It’s well intentioned, but it also happens to be incredibly annoying. It’s perhaps the indie pop equivalent of Clippy, the unlovable office assistant in Microsoft Word, as it continually prods with obvious remarks and grating noises.