Pony Up! - Make Love tothe Judges With Your Eyes

Sun 9th Jul, 2006 in Music Reviews

Make Love to the Judges With Your Eyes, the debut album from Montreal-based all-girl combo Pony Up!, comes with an attached sticker designed to capture wandering eyes on CD stores: “for fans of Sleater-Kinney, REM and The Carpenters.”

You don’t need to be an astute music follower to understand the vast differences between Sleater-Kinney, REM and The Carpenters, which makes Pony Up! all the more interesting. But the sticker doesn’t lie. Make Love’s 11 tracks (these tracks, alongside a previously released EP, span the band’s entire recorded releases since their formation in 2002) veer between the sort of lo-fi indie pop rock favoured by the music programmer of The OC, alongside sweet, breezy summery pop.

The album is led by the duel vocal assault of guitarist Sarah Moundroukas and keyboardist Laura Wills (drummer Linsday Wills and bassist Lisa Smith round out the line-up). The pair contribute several charmingly off-kilter vocal performances each, but the where Pony Up! truly excels is when they simultaneously belt out lyrics (‘The Truth About Cats and Dogs (is that they die)’). Lacking the snarl of the aforementioned Sleater-Kinney or the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O, Pony Up! can be filed alongside the saccharine sweet pop of fellow Canadians Tegan and Sara or even local heroes The Grates.

So we have tracks like opener ‘Dance For Me’, which begins with quaint keyboard-driven melodies and descends into a slightly dark but still upbeat tune. ‘Possible Harm’ and ‘Only Feelgood ‘are simply structured around danceable keyboard lines (the latter also housing a snappy falsetto-laden chorus) while the lo-fi ‘Make, Model, #’ suffers from a case of the guitars not being turned up to 11

Make Love changes very little stylistically throughout the course of the album. Songs are carried out at a medium tempo, and guitars are largely shoved to the background in favour of keyboards, organs and, in one instance, what sounds suspiciously like a kazoo. Indeed, it is when the band changes things around in the awesome ‘Pastime Endeavour’ that they sound like a force to be reckoned with; strong vocals performances, guitars and a hint of attitude (“you take the back seat at the table / now your whole life’s a fucking fable”) before the song reaches a frenzied crescendo which would prove a highlight in a live setting. Unsurprisingly, it’s the best song here.

Lyrically, Pony Up! specialize in cute one-liners and tales of love lost and love gone wrong. ‘The Truth About Cats and Dogs’ offers:

I’ve got dirt on my shoe 
tell me what I’m gonna do
Parade me around, give my beat box a squeeze
bring me back to life”

and the static, stop-start ‘Ships’
“I’ve got my new favourite basket
/ where I’m carrying all of my eggs.”

Lyrics appear in the album sleeve scrawled in grey-lead pencil, in a neat accompaniment to the DIY cover art.

Indie pedigree is afforded to the album thanks to crisp production by Howard Ian Bilerman (Arcade Fire, Wolf Parade) and Brian Paulson (Beck, Wilco). Unfortunately for the two producers, the big-name acts they previously worked alongside afforded them more creative control. Pony Up!’s simple song structures – verse, chorus, verse – are innately well-written and catchy, but they are not complex songs by any stretch of the imagination.

Pony Up! is not a band for somebody searching for something new. Rather, the band’s mostly over-familiar elements would mainly appeal to those who don’t seek originality or those unfamiliar with the glut of indie-pop bands doing the rounds. Neither special nor boring, Pony Up! are merely a good band who may one day be capable of taking an extra step to become a very good band.