[review 2007: favourites]

Three years ago, I heard the Go! Team album for the first time and thought, “wow, this band is so good, but I’ll never get to see them in Canada because they’re a small British band who probably can’t afford to cross the ocean.” And then, in 2005, the Go! Team arrived not once but twice, to waves of adoration.

Last year, I heard the Pipettes album for the first time and thought, “wow, this band is so good, but I’ll never get to see them in Canada because they’re a small British band who probably can’t afford to cross the ocean.” And then, this year, the Pipettes showed up not twice but three times, to waves of adoration.

This year, I heard the Lucky Soul album for the first time and thought, “wow, this band is so good, but I’ll never get to see them in Canada because they’re a small British band who probably can’t afford to cross the ocean.” Will my luck hold out a third time?

Lucky Soul’s star is rising. A month ago, the British-based social network last.fm began a campaign to get Lucky Soul’s UK Christmas single to the top of the national pop charts. Whatever your quibbles with the campaign or last.fm’s motives (it’s a marketing ploy for the service! the pop charts mean nothing! why are we validating music-by-reality-show-competition crap by taking part in the same sort of competition but online?) it’s clear that the Greenwich band scored a big boost in profile thanks to the campaign. And why not? The Great Unwanted goes against a ton of popular conventions—they’re resolutely retro without being ironic and devoted to pop at a time when rock and dance music is seeing a resurgence—and yet incredibly catchy and loveable. It’s the great paradox that the band should be gaining so much attention on the basis of songs like “The Great Unwanted” and “Ain’t Never Been Cool,” both of which play up Lucky Soul’s outsider status, but then again most of the kids in your high school weren’t cool either, so maybe it all makes sense in the end.

Another thing that seems a paradox about “Ain’t Never Been Cool” is that the song, like the rest of the album, is actually pretty awesomely cool—there’s poise and charm and heaps of style, and forgive me, but that kinda sounds a lot like cool to me, no? And then there’s the resolute chorus, turned into a rallying cry by singer Ali Howard. The band canon says they found Howard in a bookshop by chance and asked her to join the band; whether convenient fiction or strange truth, Howard is perfect for the role, equal parts shy pixie and sassy revolutionary, able to lend equal charm to ballads like “My Darling, Anything” and dancefloor numbers like “Get Outta Town!” Plus I will never, ever get tired of the concept of small women with big voices—it’s like, how can you contain so much fearsome power in such a small package? It’s like some sort of physical impossibility, and I like it when my music breaks the laws of physics.

Lucky Soul’s music has been described as a sort of distinctly British indie version of 60s Spectorism, which adequately describes the wall of sound pretensions and the lavish horn arrangements that mark nearly every song on The Great Unwanted. But without the heavy reverb, The Great Unwanted feels more down to earth, more cobbled together with love than immaculately produced, and it gives the album a livelier sound that’s maybe easier to love. When “Add Your Light to Mine, Baby” comes on, it sounds like there could very well be a party happening in your living room—an effect I don’t recall ever having from actual material from the 60s. But there is one track that takes a slightly different approach, and comes closest to the girl-group ideal: “My Brittle Heart,” the band’s first single and the most melodramatic by far of The Great Unwanted’s fourteen songs. This is the centrepiece right here, a massive explosion of soaring choruses, weeping strings and heartbreaking lyrics.

When I first heard Lucky Soul the album had just come out in Britain, and ordering it was a pain and a half, so at first all I had were a couple of songs I managed to scrounge off MySpace. And then I found MP3s of a few tracks, which I promptly played over and over for a solid two weeks. After a while you get to know the tracks like the back of your hand—the “it’s your party, you can die if you want to” moment of “The Great Unwanted,” or the trumpet-filled breakdown and bridge of “Add Your Light to Mine, Baby,” or the final chorus to “Ain’t Never Been Cool.” When finally my copy of The Great Unwanted arrived, there were even more treasures in store: the heartbeat verse in “My Darling, Anything,” or the entirety of “Get Outta Town!,” or even the musicbox hidden track to finish the album. There are simply so many things to love about the album that it’d be stupid to list them all. Simply put, nothing else I heard in 2007 did a number on me like Lucky Soul did, so it wasn’t hard to call The Great Unwanted my favourite album of the year.

And maybe, if I cross my fingers, and you cross yours as well, Lucky Soul might make a visit over here one day…