The return of My Favorite is generating a righteous buzz in indie circles. It's a deserved buzz as Michael Grace, Jr. and crew were, in their heyday, not only crafting sleek, smart pop, they were consuming it. It takes a real fan to make music that earns real fans, you know? And there's a level of the appeal of My Favorite here in 2022 that involves how you hear what Grace and co. are processing, and how they're producing something necessarily referential (reverential?) to past legends. That said, this new EP stands on its own as a release to get lost in; it's fucking lush, folks.
Released on acronym labels, WIAIWYA in the UK and HHBTM here, Tender is the Nightshift: Part One is an exercise in style, whether it's mimicry or a pillaging. I think if a listener said, "Oh, these guys sound like Bowie," Grace would likely say that's the point. The mission here is to conjure up a place, play tribute to an era, and let us hear obsessions being pursued, and Art being created. Just as Bowie paid tribute to Philly soul in the mid-Seventies, he was simultaneously creating his own style at the same time, one which would influence New Romantics not so long after that. Here, Michael Grace, Jr. is riffing on that era, to map out his own NY territory, and maybe reset the paradigm of what American indie is and can be.
Epic opener "Dean's 7th Dream" mixes the kind of synth-pop Japan spin-off The Dolphin Brothers dabbled in, with yearning vocals which recall the very best B-sides from the formative years of Suede. Guitar from Captain Kirk Douglas (The Roots) gives this a kick, and so things sound less mannered than they might in other hands. "Princess Diana Awaiting Ambulance" is anguish made pretty, the slick surfaces of the selection nodding in the direction of Marc Almond's brand of torch song, with Grace singing for a literal dead princess. Elsewhere, "Blues for Planet X" is more complex. Bass and vocoder (?) pull up memories of New Order's best singles, while the vocals from Jaime Babic (lead) and Stephanie Cupo tether this to the less insistent moments of the smarter Prefab Sprout albums. "Second Empire Second Arrangement" has a whiff of side two of Avalon about it, like "The Main Thing" remembered wrong, by a bunch of Yank kids who'd only seen the video on MTV once decades ago.
Call this all throwback New Wave if you must, but it's a case of the players looking back to an era not so overrun with irony, when a guy could play keyboards because there was a whole lot of soul in some of those Depeche Mode sides, and it was easier to take direct inspiration from that than the old time crooners who had the "real" soul moves down pat. My Favorite have heard your best records and they're determined (still) to recast them in their own style, riffing on those old textures to burnish into being a genre of their own. Tender is the Nightshift: Part One is immersive, and ambitious. It's the kind of record where knowing what the group's attempting is nearly as important as how this sounds. I mean, it stands on its own well enough, enough to earn those comparisons above, but it also works as a fascinating assimilation of something special that soundtracked so many of our earlier years. If John Hughes had made That Thing You Do!, only it was about a synth band, My Favorite would write and play the tunes for that group, making New Wave just as distinctive as the originals being referenced.
Tender is the Nightshift: Part One is out on Friday via HHBTM in the United States, and via WIAIWYA in the UK. More details on My Favorite and The Secret History in this superb inteview Grace did recently with chickfactor.
[Photo: Jen Meller]