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Review: 'Marshmallow Coast'
'Memory Girl'   

-  Label: 'Happy Happy Birthday To Me Records'
-  Genre: 'Indie' -  Release Date: '9.11.18.'-  Catalogue No: 'HHBTM195'

Our Rating:
This is one of those albums where the artwork and the music seem to be coming from totally different places as the artwork suggests this might be a mind melding drug induced space rock epic, but once you put the vinyl onto your record player it soon becomes clear this is an 80's influenced album of synth love songs of a kind that need a dot matrix printer for the running order on the back of the album.

Only they aren't necessarily picking the obvious influence and certainly not the cool ones as evidenced by opening song Warm Bodies that's laid back and very slightly funky love song to the warm body that you have been together in motion with it's quite slinky as you get your bodies in motion.

Take U On has a nice early 80's synth pop feel to it as the singer Andy Gonzales tells us his love has left him for dead, probably because of his love of re-working really bad 80's pop songs. I really wish I could dredge up which song it reminds me of maybe Mike and the Mechanics or something worse than that.

Lovers Leap is all about late night assignations with a bass line that has been stolen from a Sugarhill Gang record, although they probably stole it from Issac Hayes or someone like that as it's overlaid with indie guitar squiggles and woozy drums and the song is full of rising peaks.

K. Freeman Enslaved as well as being a great song title is about becoming enslaved by love over an odd synth that sounds like very dramatic background music for a messy scene in an 80's drama. But the real question is which Ken Freeman are they singing about the Electronic composer, the Astronomer/Astrophysicist or The Evangelist one, listen and decide who it's about.

Sinz Of My Father that opens the b-side really needs a DJ scratching on this slab of lo-fi techno dance pop as it goes on like the soundtrack to whatever your dad was getting up to late at night in 1982, which in my dad's case would have involved a smoke filled room as he puffed away on a pipe or a cigar while sipping on a Vodka and Lime, either way this song is damn groovy and should be a single with a good few remixes of it.

Shooting Star is sadly not a cover of the Lou Reed song or any other previous songs with the title Shooting Star but it is an oozy and woozy pop song about discovering love at 17 and like the rest of the album it's nice and chilled.

Foxy Boy really should have someone like Martika singing it with a video of the Foxy Boy and girl it's about bonding over the almost Kenny G style sax solo being played by a Bill Clinton look alike, it has a strange lounge pop meets smooth jazz with minimal techno feel to it.

The album closes with Memory Girl that has Twin Peaks style keyboards with atmospheric guitar as the tale of the memories he has for a girl that's no longer his, as he gently asks for one more chance as the lovers slowly drift apart.

If you yearn for an intelligent re-boot without the drum sound of 80's synth pop with a millennial twist on things to chill out too, then this album is just what you need find out more at www.hhbtm.com or https://www.facebook.com/marshmallowcoast/

  author: simonovitch

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