Dirty Mittens: Press

Mark Berube ||| School Of Seven Bells »

Dirty Mittens

Can you really depend on appearances? Many people still say that shoes make the man, but sometimes there’s a little something else going on behind what is immediately visible. For instance, say you’re walking down a street in the Covent Garden area of London, England in the XVIIIth century. You’ll likely come across a popular place named Tom King’s Coffee House. For all appearances and purposes, it’s just that, a coffee house: a place where someone could sit down to enjoy a hot beverage with an array of small snacks. But, in reality, Tom King’s was the meeting place of choice for prostitutes to hook up with customers, without being an actual brothel. The establishment owners and their patrons even developed their own coded lingo to keep the morality police from infiltrating their little cosm.

Considering that, you’d have to admit to there being something inherently cute about a band naming itself “Dirty Mittens” and bestowing Pinky Swear as the title of their first EP. And when you listen to The Dock, it’s hard not to be immediately caught up in singer Chelsea Morrisey’s breathy, winsome voice. “I bet a mouse would love this music,” says my girlfriend upon completing her own listen. But the breezy nature of the song and its light, shuffling, e-pop arrangements are carrying something heavier, a burdensome strain which inflects an understated craving to the song. “Oh, I’ve had enough/Throwing them off the dock to be buried/All these lonely thoughts/Goodbye loneliness” sings Morrisey amidst the unsettled sidle of horns and the blue key pads humming in the background, pining for a release from onerous, isolating feelings which swim amidst her mind, hoping to be as carefree as the timbre of the song would permit her to do. Adorable, yes. Cutesy, no way. The Dock is too well-rounded and surreptitious to be disregarded forthright.

Once More With Feeling

"We just woke up one day and all of a sudden we were a five-piece and I was like, 'Whoa. I think this is getting good.'" So says Dirty Mittens frontwoman Chelsea Morrisey on the band's rapid growth from an uneven trio to a extravagant and fun-loving exercise in pop music done right. The early days of the Mittens portrayed a band with ample room to grow, another well-intentioned act with endless potential, but rudderless in the pop music waters.

"I think we were limited by the fact that we were a three-piece," explains Morrisey. "Our idea has always been to infuse elements of doo-wop and dance-pop, but not having a bass player was a little bit of a problem. I don't think we knew what we were doing, necessarily. When we added a bass player it was an epiphany; it became clear what direction we wanted to follow."

That direction is toward a tastefully vintage brand of pop music, complete with playful horns, an abundance of hand claps, and the sweet chirping voice of Morrisey at the center of it all. With a new five-song EP entitled Pinky Swear, the group has finally hit their stride, bringing to mind the pop-genius ambitions of Jens Lekman alongside enough bedroom twee to warm even the coldest of hearts.

"I think Jens Lekman was sort of a turning point for us," Morrisey says in regard to the orchestrated Swedish pop singer, but Lekman is not her sole influence. "I spend most of my days listening to soul music. It reminds you that horns play a big part in the melodies of a song."

It's an influence which is paramount during Pinky Swear's proudest moment, the stylish "Time Forgiver," which evolves from quaint indie-pop ball-ad—complete with finger-snaps and lyrics about the chill of "Swedish winters"—into a raucous, soulful, horn-thick party jam. It's a wondrous moment that gracefully captures a once-modest band on their glorious rise to the ambitious heights of pop music. It's a thing of beauty, really.

NOT THAT TWEE: Dirty Mittens'

[MOTOWN-TINGED INDIE-POP] It takes a few minutes into "The Small Things," the first song ..e-pop band Dirty Mittens' new five-song EP, Pinky Swear, to realize that not everything is as peachy as it seems. It starts out as a pristine slice of '60s nostalgia, filled with shuffling guitar, organ and a swinging horn section, until singer (and former WW intern) Chelsea Morrisey slyly drops a bomb during the second verse: "If a hard truth applies to you," she sings, "that I had love/ And I lost love." Yup—don't dare call this a twee record.

Whereas older Mittens material survived on Beat Happening-esque simplicity and Morrisey's astute lyrics, the new EP showcases a fleshed-out sound, drawing as many cues from vintage Motown (that horn section!) as it does indie-pop. It also sounds almost uncannily like the Concretes' near-perfect self-titled debut.

Like former Concretes singer Victoria Bergsman, Morrisey has a real knack for first-person songwriting. The album stumbles from back porches to city streets, broken pleas to outlying docks. But when Morrisey deviates—especially on "Amelia," a lament from the perspective of the ill-fated pilot Amelia Earhart's father—the details are just as rich. And the sound just as infectious.

Though the record is gorgeously layered, it never feels cloying. Dirty Mittens wisely decides to keep some things simple—most evident in the record's light-as-a-summer-breeze choruses, especially the repeated mantra "It's hard it's hard/ To see your eyes/ When you got weeds growing up" on "The Small Things," and the simple onomatopoeia of "boom boom boom" that "Amelia" offers.

More than anything, Pinky Swear works because it manages to do the unthinkable: make awkward situations catchy and, oddly enough, endearing. When Morrisey says, amid a layer of backward keys and glockenspiel, "I'll sit at home and wait for the city to scare you back to me," you don't just feel the weight of her voice—you know exactly what she means.