Towa Bird - American Hero

As long as pop-rock has been a genre, waves of artists have offered themselves up as examples of how the two constituent parts are hard to balance. There is no simple way to maintain both the trend-setting fluidity of pop and the iconoclastic hard edge of rock, no matter how many faintly distorted guitars are on your boy-meets-girl ballad. With Towa Bird’s debut ‘American Hero’ comes the promise of something that manages this dichotomy: she’s both a purveyor of sensitive queer love songs, and an accomplished guitarist adept at rocking out. Her vision is frequently crystal clear: ‘Last Dance’ borrows the sounds of 2000s radio rock and twists them around an endearing letter to friendship, while ‘This Isn’t Me’ uses a brash drum beat to underpin one of Towa’s more bittersweet choruses. But this is an album plagued by flaccid production: ‘Boomerang’, for example, comes close to being a thrashy, fun hit, yet leans towards anonymous advert rock, while ‘B.I.L.L.S’ has precedents in live versions of a big presence, yet dissolves under its own weightlessness. Towa shows a lot of promise on ‘American Hero’, but this is a record which doesn’t quite know how best to use her strengths.