do reject me, do it now, do it quick

The last few days have been unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cally gloomy down here at girl­pants’ South Florida HQ: over­cast, drizzly and gen­er­ally headache-inducingly heavy on “cold” fronts and whatnot. I spent most of the weekend holed up in my cubicle with a bottle of Excedrin and my head­phones, playing Selected Ambient Works II and my entire col­lec­tion of Bios­phere records in hopes that they’d drive the demons away. Wouldn’t you know it, Monday comes and it’s a beau­tiful day–of course, I have to spend the day inside at work. But the sun was shining inside the GPHQ as well, you see–Monday was the day that I dis­cov­ered the sun­niest band in recent memory. The Capes are a syn­thpop outfit from South London. They’ll prob­ably be get­ting a lot of press for their rela­tion­ship with Bloc Party, but what they should really get atten­tion for is their razor-sharp melodies and gen­eral catch­i­ness. Their songs are chock-full of bouncy vocals, bright synths, and skit­tery gui­tars that recall just about everyone in the British pop scene over the last fif­teen or twenty years, from XTC to Blur to (yes) Bloc Party. The band’s offi­cial site offers three mp3s from their debut album Hello, including standout “Super­girls” and nearly equally catchy traxxx “First­base” and “Shin­juku Hi 5″ (revealing maybe a little JPop fetish). Review sites like Pop­mat­ters and Pre­fixmag have pretty much trashed the band as deriv­a­tive and too samey, but I can’t see that being the case based on these sample tracks. Maybe the entire album will reveal a crip­pling weak­ness, but I kind of doubt it. (Delu­sions of Ade­quacy, on the other hand, thinks it’s pretty cool.) Anyway, here’s “Carly (God­dess of Death)”, another track from the album that’s been making its rounds on teh inter­nets. It’s the first Capes song I heard and is still by far my favorite, in no small part due to a sound that slides in some­where between Blur and the Lib­ertines at their most playful. You can buy the album direct from the label or on Amazon.com. Yes, they have a myspace.