Singles

Soda Shop - Soda Shop - Farewell

Harry Milburn 29/10/2010

Rating: 4/5

Apparently- once upon a crazy time- Coca-Cola contained cocaine. Now I'm no chemist, but I'd imagine that, if you couple cocaine together with sugar, caffeine and that great coke taste- the resulting concoction, at least as soft-drinks go, would have made for pretty addicting stuff.

It's the kind of (regrettably) extinct drink, in fact, that you'd half expect Brooklyn's Soda Shop to have sold, because the debut offering from these young girl group inspired New Yorkers is about as addictive and sweet as any cocaine-laced soft drink could ever have been.

Indeed, like those classic shapely American diner-style glass bottles, this is nostalgic stuff - singer Maria Usbeck's spectral vocals recall at times the Shangri Las (albeit, in the best possible way, how the Shangri Las would have sounded had Mary Weiss ever suffered from chronic fatigue.)

The single track, Farewell, is gloriously moreish, doubtlessly very high in caffeine, and contains God(isinthetv)-knows what amount of E-Numbers, but I'm still pretty sure it's good for you. The B-Side, meanwhile, is very much a Diet version of the single, though it's no less appetising for it. It simultaneously brings to mind the sparse, windswept melancholy of the xx and the production style of Phil Spector (I stress again, only in its production- there's no gun kissing going on here).

Essentially, this 7” presents two pretty, straight forward- and very near perfect, pop songs. They are immediately evocative throwbacks to that 60s girl group sound and conversely dreamy, ethereal and interesting. Exciting stuff, then. We can only look forward to what Soda Shop have in the shop-front for us next.

Soda Shop at MySpace