I don't say this lightly but the new album from The Very Most gave me the most pure pleasure as a listener this week. I know this is a week with some "bigger" artists dropping releases, but this new record from this Boise, Idaho group is an absolute delight, start to finish. Called Needs Help, the music here is both uplifting and clever.
Jeremy Jensen, the main guy in the band, is using The Very Most as a vehicle to convey a brand of pop not entirely unlike that of the mainstays of indie from decades ago. But where a guy like Stephin Merritt brought a wry, sardonic wit to his style of romanticism, Jensen offers up a peppy American variation on early Smiths, and mid-Nineties Belle & Sebastian, and those who diligently took inspiration from those acts. If the hooks on something like "I Live My Boring Dreams" seem straight out of an old Ocean Blue single, the song itself is more complex than that. Jensen, from his HQ in Idaho, brings a world-view to this and others here that is C86 by way of Yank suburbia. The cooing "Do I Have To Do My Best All the Time?", featuring Kristine Capua (Tiny Fireflies) and Cristina Quesada (Elefant records), for example, nods faintly in the direction of early Velocity Girl, Americans who looked to the U.K. for their indie inspiration in a similar way so many years ago.
That said, nothing here feels anything less than fresh. There's a gentle urgency and buoyancy to the music here that makes the entire presentation retain a currency that's rare in 2020. The cascading piano-hooks of "Her Three-Year Old Laugh or The Time The Microphones Played in My Living Room", for example, will surely recall "Step Into My Office, Baby" for others, but the guitar solo at the heart of the song is a burst of an altogether different kind of energy. Elsewhere, "The Wrong Skills" sways and swirls like peak Aztec Camera, even as Jensen's vocals seem like something out of an old Sixties side from a band like The Left Banke, while "That Thing You Like About Yourself (Is Hurting You)", featuring Melanie Whittle (The Hermit Crabs), is a more precisely pop variatiion of what Pam Berry did with Glo-Worm or Black Tambourine. This is all elegant, and sort of a more forceful elaboration of what The Clientele do so well, kicked into spinning motion by the very American pop sense of Jeremy Jensen. The compositions here are deliberate yet euphoric, and absolutely nothing here feels wasted, no matter what lane Jensen steers this into. The stylistic variations might seem subtle, even nerdy, ones between tracks here, but Jensen knows what he's doing, taking listeners into Stereolab territory ("Ten Years Now from Today" featuring Sarah Lowenbot of Thee Ahs), and then Broadcast climes later ("It Has to Be Fine" featuring Adam and Darcie).
It seems silly to name-drop so many past acts to describe a current one, but I think that since the sound of this band hits at the same pleasure-receptors first struck by those other musicians so long ago that mentioning them only seems fair. Of course praise needs to go to every one of the many guests on this record, but, like Merritt and his 6ths, the material is all springing forth from one central figure. And in the end, it's Jeremy Jensen's skill in crafting this material and arranging the tunes that earns him comparisons to the greats of the past. Fans of any of the bands I've named will love this, as will anyone who ever wondered what splendid beast would be birthed if musicians studied old Bacharach sides as much as they did more recent My Bloody Valentine ones. Jeremy Jensen might claim to have "boring dreams", but his music creates a more exciting world and, let me say it, Needs Help is the soundtrack of that kind of world, and one of the very best records of 2020.
Needs Help is out today via the link below.
More details on The Very Most via the official Facebook page.
[Photo: Jason Sievers]