The Loves - Technicolour (Fortuna Pop)

Because this means something. It's not a collection of snarling post-pubescents following careerist dreams. It's not a set of hipsters chasing a rainbow of cool. It's not even anything close. It's the essence of pop music, and the quote on the Technicolour LP sleeve by Rita Lee ("We�ve heard it all and we�ve used it all") runs poignantly profound.

After seven years of slumming it with a smile, The Loves have created an ouvre that abounds with the most thrilling modern pop sentiments. Today, it's like they�ve plugged into some invisible cool wire, and it's the best kind of cool, a cool of '60s girl group wonder, romantic psychedelia, and utterly shambling pop'n'roll with an otherworldly ear for an off-radar reference.

Je T'aime, Baby kicks of Technicolour like a blast from Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls if it was directed in the high-romanticism of prime Truffaut, and I My She Love You fuzzes along with a wide-eyed glee that makes a million lost loves fade like waves in an ocean of new beauty.

The Loves turn the love song upside-down with shaky odes that drip with fantastic quirks, whispered Galic vignettes filling She'll Break Your Heart Again with exotic wonder, and Liz's xylophone lighting up The Rainbow Connection with distant and glimmering melancholia.

Lead singer Simon has an air, on and off record, of a poet who's just arrived in a harsh new world after years in a time capsule, and speaks about his travails with a thrilling, Darren Hayman-like openness, while co-singer Jenna provides shots of soothingly femininity. They combine in up-tempo nuggets Honey and Xs and Os with a fun-time complicity that buzzes with lo-fi charm, and when Liz pipes up from behind the keyboard with a blinding, twisting ode to summer that drips with gorgeous melodies, the set's all but complete.

Fragile, earnest and sparkling with sublime poetic sentiments, Technicolour is the multi-faceted genius arm of modern pop.

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