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Since their last full-length album, 2016’s ‘Write It’, London lo-fi slackers Happyness have shed a member (founding member Benji Compson) and seen Ash Kenazi promoted from supporting player to fierce drag-queen co-frontperson alongside Jonny Allan. The duo have described third LP ‘Floatr’ as the bookend to “the best and worst years of our lives”.
It may have been informed by a period of flux – channelling Allan’s relationship break-up and Kenazi’s experience of coming out as gay – Happyness have emerged with their charm intact. More polished and sonically expansive than their previous efforts, ‘Floatr’ couldn’t conjure up that lush, hazy lost summer feeling of drinking beers in a park more vivdly without a policeman arresting you for breaching lockdown rules.
It shimmers with wonky ’90s-indebted pop smarts, a daisy-chain of balmy nostalgia with blissed-out guitars, hushed vocals and kaleidoscopic lyrics. ‘Vegetable’, written amid the shrapnel of the group’s break-up, is a pop song that manages to include lyrical references to Chumbawamba’s ‘Tubthumping’, RuPaul’s Drag Race alumnus Jujubee and Scientology. It’s a veritable Family Fortunes board of ‘Things You Wouldn’t Expect To See In A Song Together’. The title track, meanwhile, deals evocatively with the struggle to come to terms with yourself.
From ‘What Isn’t Nurture’ – written as a response to Cass McCombs‘ ‘What Isn’t Nature’ – to ‘Bothsidesing’, both of which twinkle with a gorgeous longing, the melodies are uniformly lovely. The band touch on the slacker rock of Teenage Fanclub with (‘Ouch (yup)’ and ‘Undone’, while ‘When I’m Far Away (From You) is a plaintive, guard-dropped ballad that’s as tender as a fresh bruise. Longing for the grungier end of Happyness’ sound? Try ‘Milk Float’ and the fabulously named ‘Anvil Bitch’.
Were those unfamiliar with Happyness to guess at their musical output from their press photos alone – which capture Kenazi in full drag as though about to lip-sync for his life – they probably wouldn’t think of The Flaming Lips, Pavement and Sparklehorse. Slacker rock has never been associated with ineffable glamour (for most such bands the height of sartorial elegance is wearing spritzing Febreze on a T-shirt that isn’t Dinosaur Jr).
And although it’s accidental, it’s equally expectation-challenging that they’ve released the perfect going-outside record (they’ve been performing quarantine sessions against a mock beach-hut backdrop with inflatable palm trees) at a time when we can do anything but. Cans on the balcony or next to yucca and staring out of the window, anyone?
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