Album of the Week: Smother Your Brother - The Daddyo’s

 

Words: Dan E. Brown

Songwriting duo since middle school, Kylie Slabby & Kylie Hastings of The Daddyo’s have spent a lot of time turning their wide eyed, sugar-coated musings of life, into a sparkling array of pop-laced grunge and shoegaze that carries with it a dazzling assortment of head swaying hooks. The dream-pop team’s sophmore album, Smother Your Brother, continues in the same vein where It’s A Tough World Out There For A Lonely Girl left off, and is a clutch of songs that will transport you into The Daddyo’s heady zone of surf-vibe euphoria and kaleidoscopic bubblegum color with ease.

Opener “Damsels” is the calling card for all what’s good from The Daddyo’s, sounding like a revisited snapshot to the Motown era mingled with the raggedy aesthetic that we’ve become accustomed to from such lo-fi surf bands as The Growlers. Indeed, the trend in slacker surf-vibe nonchalance is carried on right throughout the record, with Kylie Slabby’s vocals sitting ethereally on top of the instrumentation, even when we hit patches of brooding atmosphere and feel in songs like “Mexican King” and “Taco Spaceship”, both sounding like as if The Shangri La’s grew up in the 90’s and listened to the Grunge explosion.

It’s an ebullient affair for The Daddyo’s, with the record perfectly capturing the sound that the Kylie BFFs shoot for, that being space, airiness and somewhat innocence (although hints to hedonism is referenced in songs like “Mexican King”) of music that sounds like it was written in an adolescents bedroom. Something that could easily soundtrack a sleepover between friends or a respite for some pensive and dark-set thoughts, Smother Your Brother’s rich tapestry of pop-laced grunge blended with the surf-vibe exterior sees the album as something of a steady grower as we head on into the darker months of this year.