"I miss my coochie coo/ Now I'm boo hoo blue" is poetry any way you take it, and sweet-tooth'd New Zealand sweethearts The Brunettes show themselves as authentically unironic authors of such way-cute couplets on their debut disc Holding Hands, Feeding Ducks and its six-song follow-up The Boyracer EP. Both of which find the Kiwi combo indulging in authentic analogist tone and boy/girl vocal interplay and rampant backing-vox/handclaps and all kinds of lyrics of such sly intent — such indulgences the kind that give indulging a good name.

With gear bought from a King Loser garage sale, a record collection filled with, like, Nancy & Lee and Honeys albums (or something), and an affection for the lovers-in-love-yeah clichés that ran rife in the jukeboxes of yore, The Brunettes are one of the few combos of recent days harking back to past days that actually rise above the lazy ways of the pop-cultural pastiche. Rather than smarmy post-modern condescension for the times and tone they evoke, The Brunettes have an earnest love; and, as fun and funny as they are, they're not joking around by showing it. They take this silly '60s-styled gear really seriously, it seems, it not being just some fashion thing, a dressed-up dressing serving as front to a band that doesn't care. No, boy, they do it from their hearts, with said organs all giddy with that dum-dum-diddy, their sophisticated displaying of sophisticated boom-boom so damn good I fear I'm doing a bad job of relating the extent of its goodness in relayed syntax, with the comedy and the artistry and the sincerity and the quality and the melody of this gear hard to wrangle into rock-reviewer's syntax.