From their super-fine album Holding Hands, Feeding Ducks (Lil' Chief Records - initial copies come with a colouring book, which might give you a hint at what kind of sounds we're talking about here), "Summer Love" has found its way easily into my end of year selection pack of Top Tunes sent out to special persons on the back of its simple Pop perfection. By which I mean tinny keyboards right out of 1983, lyrics that unashamedly reference Pop Culture -

"I wanna be Bruce 'cos he was born to run, and Brian cos he was Fun Fun Fun, I could do with summer love with a girl named Sandy" - or - "I wanna be Jimmy Dean cos he was bad, a human ashtray in a Jag"

and the feeling that oh, tomorrow might be the end of the world but for today we have a song in our hearts and lipstick traces on our psyches.

Listening to The Brunettes reminds me of reading Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, around the time when Dr Wertham's Seduction of the Innocents is published and the national outcry against comics resulted in mass comic book pyres across the USA. In Chabon's book Clay ponders the criticism levelled at comics of being escapist fantasy. To Clay's mind this is perhaps the most positive, redeeming aspect of comic books, not some dreadful negative as Wertham proclaimed. I have to say I'm on Clay's side on that, and for me this is why The Brunettes are so fine; they are great escapist fantasy - it's a Pop that exists within its own ludicrously tight frame of reference; a Pop that makes no claims at anything other than the wild delights of (eternal) adolescence; a Pop that creates a warm sanctuary from the insidious creeping darkness and hate that the 'real' world seems to throw up with alarming regularity.

And for this we ought to clasp The Brunettes close to our chests and breathe 'I love you' into their flowing Phantom Lady locks."