- Alvvays aren't reinventing the wheel. So much can be said for most of rock'n'roll these days, but Alvvays are deliberately reaching into the sunny history of pop, borrowing an authentically vintage looking wheel and giving it a good polish. Their obsession is such that they even borrowed the name of some former purveyors of British pop goodness -Always- and now have to spell their name differently to avoid confusion. Kind of a foreseeable problem, that one.

Anyway, it's more of a case of shared obsessions than turf wars and there are now generations of bands invoking that slightly melancholic guitar pop now between thirty and sixty years old. Indeed Alvvays could be said to be reviving Belle & Sebastian or Teenage Fanclub as much as any c86 style band from the '80s; but they probably have to wait a few more years to be said to be reviving The Vivian Girls.

With their jangly but very sweet powerpop, mournful lyrics, light layering of fuzz and very warm production taking the hard edges off everything, Alvvays are certainly making a very canny shopping trip, loading up on many of the best bits of a lot of different sounds, which is slightly ironic, given that it produces nine songs of a most uniform pop. Even so and especially with lyrics that -at first glance- make no effort to break away from the formula of bittersweet love song after bittersweet love song, I mean, this really should be a lot more boring than it is, but Alvvays never is.

It's helped along by Molly Rankin, scion of the very musical Rankin Family, who has inherited a very pleasantly pure voice and a great asset to the band. Molly uses it to deliver lyrics that are -as I said- often generic, but which are still capable of drawing forth a wry grin, like when she awkwardly tries to catch the attention of a boy with the slightly panicked line: “Is it a good time? / ...or is it highly inappropriate?” I think it's just the right time for Alvvays: the world needed a band that's well informed enough to make everyone feel it's OK to enjoy what is, despite being vintage, dorky cool, at the end of the day, unashamed pop.

- Chris Cobcroft.