It's hard to do anything original anymore. And when you try on the styles of the past, some assume it's being done with an ironic detachment, or as a means to signal a style that's easier to put on than master. Lucikly, Howless, a new band from Mexico City, imbue their music with the right degree of earnest intensity, enough that one feels transported to an earlier decade, when stuff like what's on To Repel Ghosts was more abundant.
The album kicks off with "Fade Out", and while the song is perhaps named after the Loop album, the track sounds more like Pornography-era Cure than anything else. The riffs are robust, and the rhythms propulsive, enough that even a sleek run at synth-pop like on "Levels" retains a near-goth-ish fervor. Howless are committed to meandering around a few sub-genres and, thankfully, they blend this stuff together in such a way that fans of Curve and Xymox, for instance, might find common ground on To Repel Ghosts. There's little here you haven't heard before, of course, but the playing gives this the kind of power to make the whole thing full of infectious charm. Come on and dance like it's 1991 again!
To Repel Ghosts is out on Friday via Static Bloom Records.
[Photo: Andrea Gonar]