Wet Leg are a parable for modern life on their highly anticipated debut album.
In December 2021 a happening occurred in Naples; preserved as relics at the city’s cathedral, the blood of the third century former bishop St. Januarius provided the source material from which, after a period of intense prayer, the powered residue became liquid once again. The current Archbishop Domenico Battaglia promptly declared a miracle.
We shouldn’t expect as much from musicians, but sometimes the industry, looking for heroes where they’re in constantly short supply, will offer up some poor suckers anyway, often based on claims as dubious as those made on the Neapolitan Riviera.
Wet Leg – publicly duo Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers – also had quite a significant 2021, largely due to the slow burning triumph of their debut single Chaise Lounge, an irresistible contradiction-in-terms which spliced the garage rumble of early Strokes with a teasingly deadpan sex-positivity.
Although it was in form the tweaking of a decades-old formula, still nothing else managed to sound like it and, along with Yard Act, the school friends duly found themselves with a management deal and all the other Next Big Thing trimmings.
A clutch of follow-up singles and, almost a year later, the band’s eponymous, Dan Carey-produced first album duly arrives, wisely attempting to play things as cool and low key as possible.
Too often we’ve seen indie’s latest saviours fizzle out in a cloud of self-conscious angst and this, it’s clear from the opening notes of the ode to fragility Being In Love, is not a mistake the pair are consciously about to make.
For Teasdale’s part, she’s quite happy not to live up to anybody’s expectations: ‘As a woman, there’s so much put on you, in that your only value is how pretty or cool you look. But we want to be goofy and a little bit rude. We want to write songs that people can dance to.’
That’s a mission of course with a degree of relativity. Despite being hardly old enough to remember, in the album’s melancholy phases – especially on Supermarket, Piece Of Shit and I Don’t Wanna Go Out – the dominant influence is that of 90’s alt-rock icons The Breeders (although the latter track also gently rephrases Bowie’s The Man Who Sold The World).
This nail chewing introvert/lairy extrovert juxtaposition seems to be modern life’s natural condition such that, in the moments where the Wet Leg of stealing both your car and your man face forward, they do so with a conviction that feels authentic, if a little forced.
There’s some absurdist joy though on the hugely underrated kindergarten pop of Oh No – and the confidence to plumb in the deliberately awful lyric, ‘You’re so woke/Diet Coke’, whilst the kooky shoegaze of Angelica nods at the marginal historic returns for Britpop’s women in the guise of Lush and Elastica.
Teasdale is more direct on Wet Dream, a kiss off to a sex-pest ex on which she asks, ‘What makes you think you’re good enough to think about me/When you’re touching yourself’, but it’s the closer Too Late Now on which the group’s split personalities finally combine.
Here the pace builds gradually, the singer’s words spilling out like little knives as the joyless emotional sinkhole of always being someone else for everyone else is laid bare.
The news is that there is no cure for cancer amongst these songs. This record will not make you walk on water or turn it into wine. Instead, it’s a perfectly functional collection of often funny, bittersweet tunes which by design lack the special sauce of the thing that put Wet Leg in a position to write them in the first place.
Long term, this may prove out to be the real miracle after all.
