Lock the door, spin the bottle and crank up the first great breakout band of 2006: New York City's puberty-obsessed Morningwood, an art-rocky, post-punky, riff-randy group whose self-titled debut album is more fun than raiding your parents' liquor cabinet.
Led by 23-year-old singer Chantal Claret, a soon-to-be-star who coos every track on the band's debut as if she were narrating a naughty slumber party, Morningwood is a tough act to peg. The Pixies for dummies? The Breeders making a Mountain Dew commercial? Joan Jett does Juilliard?
Whatever the case, the result is 11 propulsively cool pop songs about tweaking your inner teen, party-appropriate noisemakers with wicked hooks and bold parts: slinky bass lines from former Wallflower Pedro Yanowitz, fuzzed-out guitar from noted Spacehog Richard Steel and heart-attack drums from Cibo Matto pal Japa Keenon.
Making sure the punk-edged mayhem stays melodious is superproducer Gil Norton, a man who has mixed catchy and cacophony for such acts as the Foo Fighters and, not so coincidentally, Belly and the Pixies. Speaking of the latter, there's no doubt why Norton was drawn to Morningwood: Much like the Pixies' Kim Deal and Belly's Tanya Donnelly, Claret is a songwriting whiz with a Lolita fixation, an expert tease who often uses a Bambi-eyed delivery to deliver wink-wink lyrics.
But whereas Deal and Donnelly were ultimately limited by their refusal to bend to pop demands - alas, they were never interested in making hits - Claret has the looks, drive and silly style to be the next Gwen Stefani. She just about sells herself as such on first single, Nth Degree, a spelling bee exercise a la Gwen's Hollaback Girl, in which Claret repeatedly teaches us her band's name. The song eventually breaks down into buzzing guitar parts, a disco-ball beat and hair-metal shrieks. It's silly, but it's also nothing short of f-u-n.
Claret, who co-wrote most of the songs with Yanowitz, is too young to be truly nostalgic for the birth of MTV. But the ferocious Televisor, with its curiously familiar guitar crunch to a pogoing New Wave beat, nevertheless perfectly captures what it felt like to be seduced at a young age by the fledgling music channel.
When she really teases things up - as on the hand-clap seduction of the not-so-safe-sex song Take Off Your Clothes - Claret reminds me of Garbage's Shirley Manson and Berlin's Terri Nunn, pinup fantasies who also wield a great deal of voice and good, old-fashioned star power.
"One thing I chose to admit is that your mama shouldn't let me babysit," she zings on Babysitter, which just might be the catchiest tune about a sexual predator since My Sharona. Claret continues with a purr: "Can I crawl in bed with you? I'll let you stay up real late." Darkly comic and potentially criminal, the tune is an irresistible sendup of grade-school crushes on the sitter next door. The song might get Claret in trouble, but at least it will get her noticed. And with a newcomer this promising, there's nothing wrong with that.
