★★★★½
Cheesy, twisted, vaguely childlike, and utterly unhinged, Lizzie is the living embodiment of everything that makes Wimps great. The fact that she’s not technically alive is beside the point.
That’s her grinning mug on the cover of Wimps’ debut album Suitcase. She’s the band’s official mascot, and her crude visage perfectly sums up the pleasures of this decidedly off-kilter brand of punk. Suitcase is as advertised on the box, then: it’s ecstatic, eccentric stuff, filled with simple, catchy choruses and amusingly mundane thematic material.
There’s a strong vein of humour running throughout the album, but it’s worth noting that it never teeters over into parody or ridicule. Indeed, the whacky pleasures of a song like ‘Dump’ (“I live in a dump!”) feel strikingly earnest, and even the hilarious ‘Old Guy’ is ultimately more loving than critical.
Songs like ‘Vampire’ and ‘Middle Ages’ provide the kind of choruses that work best when belted out at two o’clock on a drunken morning but they never come to feel reductive or dumb. In that way, Suitcase is an album of contrasts – messy and yet deliberately, brilliantly constructed; intelligent yet determinedly lowbrow; funny yet sincere.
Though it’s supremely enjoyable from beginning to end, Suitcase isn’t an idle pleasure. Rather, it’s an exquisitely drawn work from a band that takes its music more seriously than one might initially think.
Suitcase byWimpsis available though Kill Rock Stars/Redeye.
