Labels: Slow Fizz Records
Review by: Bob Alderdice
The Hussy come from Madison, Wisconsin and play garagey punk with a fair bit of 60s influence. And they are awesome.
I love everything about this record. I love the retro spiral artwork on the cover and I love the quirky lo-fi production (check out the craziness on ‘Have a Say’. Makes me think of Bubble Bobble on the Commadore 64!). I love that they make loads of crazy spelling mistakes in the liner notes, presumably for no other reason than to amuse themselves.
Most of all though, I love the songs.
To say there are only two of them in the band, The Hussy do a pretty good job of thrashing out thirteen trashy, minimalist two-minute pop songs. Their songs flit between angsty up-tempo punk such as ‘I’m Me’, to more poppy doo-wop laden tracks like ‘Sexi Ladi’, and then cover everything in between.
From the opening track, I found The Hussy to be instantly likeable, so much so that I was singing along to this record on the first listen (not a lie – although admittedly there is a lot of ‘Oh-oh’ing so it’s not too challenging). When it got to midway throught the b-side I was bouncing around the room (again, not a lie – I must have looked like a right tit. Still, it was fun, and I’ll probably end up doing the same thing on the next listen). Then, in a little over 20 minutes, it was over! Short, but still incredibly satisfying.
Quite simply, this record is a lot of fun. Fun fun fun. Will it have the staying power for me to come back to it in a couple of years? I don’t really care. Right now, I’ve just found the soundtrack to my summer and it’s got a wicked-ass blue spiral on the front.