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Diabetic ears might have had a hard time with the sickly sweet cuteness of New Zealand's The Brunettes up to this point. While the band's boy-girl harmonies and hipster-courtship narratives were always well-crafted, they could have the effect of watching a couple sit on the same side of a booth in a restaurant, feeding each other from their dinner plates in between delighted coos. That "ewww" factor is decreased significantly on this track from their forthcoming Sub Pop debut, Structure and Cosmetics.
Over a creeping piano line and a crisp rhythm, Heather Mansfield exhalts her intricate hairdo in a dispassionate yet pretty high tone. The instrumentation here is nervous and understated, so when Jonathan Bree's crooner voice enters with a wave of lush strings, the slight saccharine residue is forgivable due to contrast (plus, his "isn't she . . . a . . . beautiful Brunette" line gains a point for being meta-cute instead of plain old cute). The two interchanging vocal bits trade off for a while, until the layers recede to feature gently whirring electronics and a restrained guitar strum a bit past the song's mid-point. As the drumbeat returns and the sonic layers once again begin to stack, Mansfield and Bree eschew lyrics to combine in some comely oohs. When focused on the coif specifics, or dealing in vagueness of pure harmony the band fares better than their formerly mushy middle ground. A song like this that finds room for both poles is flirting with the superb.