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Giant Drag

Hearts And Unicorns

Label: Kick Ball

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On the charmingly-titled opener ‘Kevin Is Gay’, Annie Hardy – singer with LA indie rock duo Giant Drag – opens her delectable lungs and intones ‘365750 – you’re all I need’. Up until this point the pair come on like a parallel-universe My Bloody Valentine – if the legendary quartet had spent more time watching ‘Top Of The Pops’ and less time gazing lovingly at their overdrive pedals. But with the addition of Annie’s tones – the type of laconic drawl so beloved by the US college-rock fraternity – we’re catapulted into the world of Kelly Deal, Kim Gordon and the days when American indie rock ruled the underground roost.

And while it’s essentially this mood which defines the rest of ‘Hearts & Unicorns’, the band display enough invention and lightness of touch throughout to nurture the interest of even the most jaded shell-likes, offering the kind of hooky, noisy guitar pop which Courtney Love would kill her own children to be able to write. On ‘Pretty Little Neighbour’, long-forgotten indie-noise heroes like Drop Nineteens and Scrawl come elbowing their way into the equation, and the album’s more tender moments evoke the likes of Mazzy Star, Thalia Zedek and even Tanya Donnelly, albeit with a brasher, more detached outlook and a far snottier disposition.                                          

Nowhere is this seductive brattishness more evident than on ‘High Friends In Places’, with the pair – completed by Micah Calabrese on drum and synthesizer duties – hitting previously undiscovered pay dirt in the form of a bastard offspring of Kevin Shields and J. Mascis, three minutes of glorious noise which is intensely brooding and soaring in turn. 

Even with the lingering feeling that Giant Drag will have to up their ante slightly in order to stand beside the likes of The Rogers Sisters and Ill Ease in representing the grubbier, more distorted end of US indie revisionism, ‘Hearts & Unicorns’ is a debut album not without charm, and one which on occasion hints at something very special. And with a song entitled ‘You Fuck Like My Dad’, it can be of little doubt that further releases will see Giant Drag step up to the plate. - Dan Carney