It’s fair to say that music deeply affects a lot of us. I have plenty of songs that make me feel energised, melancholic, or relaxed but I’ve never seen an album so laser-focused on providing a lift to the mundane.
Songs To Clean Your House To by The Perics is so much more than a housework performance enhancer. The tracks delve into the sound of the nineties, bringing this shiny, bright, and hopeful timbre that adds energy throughout, even in songs with more serious themes. This 90s haize adds charisma to the whole album that shows off its excellent influences. The DNA of this collection is made up of Weezer, The Pixies, and a little Nirvana.
Things Look Pretty Good opens the album with a joyous anthem about love and growing in life. The track conveys the confidence that comes with love. There’s a sense of both comfort and excitement that comes through in the delivery. The guitar work in this track exudes the nineties steeze I mentioned earlier through light distortion and a bright timbre.
The subsequent track, Circles, explores the more serious theme of getting stuck in a rut and how demotivating it can be to feel like however hard you push against your habits you end up where you started. This is coupled with more heavy and rock-inspired guitar roots, staying strong in the nineties energy but exploring a different aspect of the decade.
The track Time further covers the idea of being stuck in a rut. To me, by looking back at a happier moment, the track shows how difficult times in life can make you feel stuck in the past. The beautiful contradiction with these tracks is that despite their heavy stories, they have an energetic melodic throughline that puts their lethargy in contrast with the power of the music. It’s a juxtaposition that works nicely.
Mary Celeste is another excellent track that feels like a song about moving on from hard times. This marks a change in the album's energy, with a more joyous vibe that I must say, kicks the cleaning into the next gear, especially with the guitar solo in the second half, expanding on the motifs covered in the first half brilliantly. The excellent guitar work is continued on Stop the World, with this crunchy distortion which works brilliantly with the pop-punk vocal delivery. The final few tracks on the album have a hopeful transience to them, covering the themes of moving on from relationships with an unquestionable vigour and power that elevates the tracks beyond the traditional breakup ballads, imbued with guilt and insecurity.
Whether you’re looking to get some housework done or listen to the lyrics of an introspective nineties collection, this album works with you on every level and delivers tracks that are sonically and thematically unique.
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