It's time for twee! Or is it… Worldpeace DMT hold us hostage for a cuppa with new album Stick Around For Tea, where Leo Fincham and Rowan Please serve up the sweetest pop tracks around.
If I told you that I’d mastered the ‘H’ chord on my new Stratocaster, would you be really impressed? I’ll answer for you: yes, you would.
Stick Around For Tea is an order doled out by both the voice of an anthropomorphised guitar and a Hare Krishna's mobile provider. Worldpeace DMT, boy-girl electronic duo Leo Fincham and Rowan Please, return with a third helping of silly lyrics and strange sounds, so unfold your napkin, sit up straight, and let the niceties begin.
Their limbo mixtape Flowers Powers, released earlier this year, and first album The Velvet Underground and Rowan saw Worldpeace emerge from the soup of noughties-deifiers crawling about in the recent times. Needless to say, Please is one half of The Femcels. When Rowan isn't singing about being ‘Skins-coded’, she and Gabriela Turton spend their time chanting about ‘guppies’ and telling our world how beautiful JavaScript is.
Drawing from this early-00s blogosphere indie twee word vomit of an era I never really lived through (with no Tumblr qualifications, I’m prohibited from commenting upon the genesis of the genre further), Stick Around For Tea is at once self-consciously childish and knowingly wry. But glancing sideways at you from an unrelenting wall of glockenspiels and Christmas jingle bells and television footage sounds is a sensibility of uber Britishness. And menacingly, it's compelling you to stick your pinkie finger out.
My favourite track comes early on in the album. The 1-minute-38-second tune ‘Love You Too’ is a whirlwind of angsty guitars, madcap arcade game sirens and frustrated yells. Amidst the barrage of samples (barking dogs, more glockenspiels), the misfire of an awkward crush builds lyrically. Please cries out in confused disgust, ‘You said that I love you too, I said “that is not what I said!”’ and all is revealed to be not half as saccharine as it seems.
The nonsense spat out in ‘Thank You’ is straight out of a school assembly. Fincham’s voice is buried beneath the crows of a children’s choir, a force that theatrically (‘We’d like to thank you for and take you home’) and interchangeably obscures and magnifies each of the duo’s words. He quietly laments the attendance of evil tigers, spiders and snow, and is subsequently drowned out by the kids. Easily half of these tunes could have been made up by a cult-like friendship group, ritually passed around and performed from the playground.
But somehow I feel that the idealistic and childlike universe of the album is beckoning in a bizarre kind of Christmas: a nostalgia fest itself tinged with ironies and imperfections, arrivals and departures. Expressed in the title track is a demonic tea party composed by Rowan: ‘You’ll never wrong me, you’ll stick around for tea’. The tone of the album is spiked by the unsettling Ps and Qs of Rowan Please and Johnny Thanku, asking us politely (violently) to stay a while (forever).
Within the idiosyncratic twists and turns of banjos and jaw harps coupled with Rowan’s wavering articulations and Fincham’s earnest pleas, their true accomplishment is held in the simplicity of their lyricism (usually just 2 verses per song, punctuated by a lot of ‘ooohs’ and ‘aaahs’). ‘Stratocaster’ makes a mockery of a teenaged relationship: a posh girl wants to play her swish guitar, the guitar wants to be played, and her boyfriend wants to play both of them. Please vocalises the guitar’s solo in that knowing vein, self-consciously singsongy to muddle the adult content with childish noise.
Just to check again if you're still paying attention by the end of the record, the duo slam their storybook shut and conclude, ‘Don’t take our advice, we don’t know what we’re on about’. Well, it's far too late for any of that, because I’ve been swept away with their half optimism, following along with the words on the interactive whiteboard in the school hall of Worldpeace DMT.