For a band that hails from the snowy hills of Burlington, Vermont, there’s something intriguingly sunny about Happy Birthday’s music. The band’s rise to success was one of those that was notoriously meteoric, as within the span of a year they found themselves snapped up by Sub Pop records and on their way to putting out a debut album. While such an origin may produce leave some listeners skeptical and nearly all struggling bands jealous, this groups debut actually does a pretty good job of justifying that quick success. The self-titled LP is full of breezily light DIY sounding pop music that, while it may not be the most wholly original sounding stuff on the planet, is pretty tough to dislike.
The band is fronted by Kyle Thomas, who spends most of the album leading the charge on the kind of fuzzy, beach-pop that has become increasingly popular over the last couple years. On opening track, “Girls FM” (which is also the first single off the album), Thomas doesn’t seem terribly concerned with making any kind of huge splash or saying a whole lot of anything, but rather seems content just churning out a fun and catchy pop song. There’s a lack of pretentiousness to a lyric like; “Baby, baby, just please change your mind, maybe we’ll understand love at the end of time, and answer won’t be hard to find, when it’s gone now baby, gone now baby” that makes it not only fun to listen to, but pretty easy on the tongue as well. For the most part, this is the trend that Happy Birthday follows across their debut album, and it proves to be a wise choice.
The band is able to blend that haze with a funny kind of weirdness to songs like “Perverted Girl” and “Maxine the Teenage Eskimo” that give them a bit more immediacy than their simple premises would initially suggest. Don’t get me wrong, the music is still lo-fi at its core, but even still, there’s a bit of poppy sentiment lurking here that makes these songs stand out from the barrage of similar music that so many young bands have been spewing out over the last couple years. I mean, lets’ face it, there’s a certain visceral simplicity to somebody singing “now I wanna break shit” that you can’t help but appreciate. Happy Birthday is able to tap into that simplicity, often in humorous and inventive (even if somewhat sophomoric) ways. Putting aside the super-infectious “Girls FM,” my next favorite track on the album might just be “Subliminal Message” which is able to combine laid-back vocals, whining hums, and a smatter of drums into one deliciously listenable package. The song isn’t intricate, but it’s enjoyable.
Something else that I was struck by was what seemed like an almost retro quality to some of the bands music. “Pink Strawberry Shake,” for example, seemed to possess some spirit of rock and roll past that I couldn’t quite put my finger on amidst all the haze and distortion. The song is full of winking innuendo that suggests (gasp!) Thomas might not just be singing about a strawberry shake. This wry humor is another theme that keeps creeping up across the album, but what’s most impressive about it is that this sense of humor is continuously applied in fun and inventive ways that consistently help to elevate the music past its slight subject matter. Not that this should come as much of a surprise on an album that boasts song titles like “Zit,” “Perverted Girl,” and “Fun.”
As I said at the outset, the band has not been together for a whole ton of time, and while having a lack of polish is what most of the music is meant to display, there are moments where things feel less than fleshed out. “2 Shy,” for example, strikes me as being a bit more bland than most of the songs on the album. It keeps all of the simplicity of the stronger tracks, but dials back the urgency, and as such, a lot of the charm. Meanwhile, “Eyes Music” sounds a bit too scattered, almost as though the band were trying to throw too many less than complimentary pieces all into the same track. It’s moments like these where the album tends to stumble, but fortunately, such missteps are almost certainly due to a lack of experience, and are the kind of thing that you would expect the band to start ironing out as long as band continues to play together. Besides, on an album that is more obviously reliant on raw energy than it is on carefully measured craft, this is the kind of defect that the listener is likely going to be willing to overlook.
It’s going to be very interesting to watch Happy Birthday continue to grow and mature, and I can’t help but wonder what path their sound will take. Based on the raw ingredients on display here, the band (and Thomas in particular) clearly possesses all the tools that suggest a potentially bright musical future. Of course, it doesn’t hurt one bit that the music is just poppy enough to have some of the songs (i.e. “Girls FM” and “Subliminal Message”) break through to a larger and more mainstream audience than many lo-fi bands could reasonably hope for. None of this, though, should distract from the fact that whatever the future may hold, Happy Birthday has crafted a very self-assured debut, that is both unique and very enjoyable. Any way that you shake it, that ain’t bad.
SCORE: 3.6 out of 5.0