There are two sides to every coin, but it would have been a brave soul who bet that the flip to Jenny Lewis’s ‘The Voyager’ would look like this.
‘Nice As Fuck’ finds Lewis in tandem with Au Revoir Simone’s Erika Forster and the Like’s Tennessee Thomas, with the trio resolutely committed to the most basic of templates. Setting aside the widescreen west coast pop and narrative complexities of her last album, here Lewis acts as a cog in the machine.
Her melodies are economical, garlanding a bass and drums cocktail cut from the playbooks of dub and post-punk. There's something eminently unexpected and enjoyable about the setup and, for the most part, ‘Nice As Fuck’ is another Lewis record that creeps under the skin and stays there.
The dub movements of Homerun and Mall Music are straightforward and satisfying, while the brief introduction of keys on Cookie Lips makes the album’s best melody sound unexpectedly palatial.
Rather than be constrained by the stripped back nature of these songs, the trio make sure that their constituent parts all work properly. The rhythm section is unfailingly propulsive, while Lewis is still magnetic in these surroundings.
‘Nice As Fuck’ will likely find space alongside the Jenny and Johnny record as a curio in Lewis’s back catalogue but, like that album’s winning air of insouciant cool, don't make the mistake of thinking its slight frame can’t pack a punch.
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