Everyone Smiles by The Maureens (2024)(Meritorio Records)
Beyond it’s proceeding decades, sixties music has refused to die. Whether it was attacked by huge flared glam rock bands of the seventies, barged by big shoulder pads and double denim of the eighties of the nineties, or indeed hammered by the CD alt. rock addled climes of the 2000s, somehow the 1960s still seems to touch the inner musicality of everyone, from aging hipsters to today’s youngsters who don’t quite ‘get’ the current musical peccadillos they are supposed to like.
Formed in 2012, Everyone Smiles is the fourth album by Utrecht, Netherlands based foursome The Maureens and their second release with a Meritorio Records label whose jangle-pop propensities make them the perfect musical bed partner for this wonderful act.
Everything so very jangly about the sixties is represented here. As such the wonderful opening triple salvo of Stand Up!, Lost and Found and Sunday driver initiates the album with a jangly climate that falls off the edge of the power-pop beauty of acts such as The Vapour Trails or 2nd Grade, directly into heavier psyche-rock waters of more harmonic end of The Doors.
Whilst Do You, Motherless Bird and and Only Child reduces the psyche rock to a more jangly washed out The Beatles-style psyche pop, the true stand outs of the album are the ones which concentrate on the more traditional 1960’s jangle-pop with Fell In Love, Alison and High and Dry on the Backseat paying definitive homage to the beautifully chiming jangle of acts such as The Left Banke and The Byrds.
The Maureens offer the most beautiful trip down the most perfect of (modern) sixties lanes…grab a copy of the vinyl from Meritorio Records here.
janglepophub.home.blog 