THE MAYFAIR SET – THE MAYFAIR SET

Lo-fi is still cool. One of the joyous things about the anti-folk and experimental folk movements is that artists like The Mayfair Set feel free reign to explore their musical textures in whatever context they like, regardless of budget or studio prowess. In fact, and it’s certainly the case with this album, the rougher round the edges, the more intriguing. The Mayfair Set are a duo from (you guessed it) Brooklyn, NY, comprising the elusively moniker-ed Blank Dogs and Dum Dum Girls, both solo noise-pop artists in their own right. What they have created here is a dreamier affair than their respective punk-tinged backgrounds, with simplistic, crystal-ship melodies and bubbling, obscure guitars and wobbly synths colouring the 4-track cassette aesthetic. All of this is cool, but it really feels as a whole that the aesthetic choices and obscure nature of the performance outweighs the songs. The dramatic, eerie anthem Cease To Be takes things to an interesting level of muddle-headedness, but across the board there’s not a whole lot to chew on except for some vaguely constructed new-wave meanderings. So this kind of lo-fi is cool, but only to a point – one is left wanting either more beauty, or more blood and guts.

**1/2