Boys Boys Boys! Is that exclamation mark in the band’s name an indication of excitement or exasperation? After a succinct listen to their album YES, my guess is it’s a confused combination of both.
I’ll be honest and say on first listen I was hoping for more from this Perth-based sextuplet and tried to overlook the childishness of the vocals, but by the time I reached the third track on YES, there was too much I could no longer forgive or ignore. The lollipop vocals are a throwback to Aqua-styled Euro-pop and the cheesy 90s styled call and response that the singers throw back and forth to each other is over-used.
The cringe-worthy lyrics don’t do much for the music either. Although they cite 60s girl groups as a significant influence, ‘Mountains’, ‘The Prawn’ and ‘Super Nintendo’, which are all about discos, boys (surprisingly!) and crying are not naïve and fun but childish. Tracks like ‘Ticky-Ticky Boom’ throw around lines like “You can be captain of my battleship / Play you on repeat like a video clip” and in the ingeniously named ‘Spando Budgie’, the girls call “Don’t worry about the budgie in your spando / I kinda like it / Living in your spando! Spando budgie!”
There’s nothing extraordinary about Boys Boys Boys’! sound. Instrumentally, the riffs are catchy, like a pop rendition of The Presets, but they’re not extraordinary. They combine syths with distorted guitars and employ fast rhythms that you could surely dance to at a high school dance party. In fact, maybe that would be the only suitable place to play YES because I certainly wouldn’t recommend it for your stereo.
