Cherry Pickles – Will Harden Your Nipples
Cool. You’ve either got it or you don’t and the rudimentary, downright ramshackle Cherry Pickles ooze the stuff … and that’s despite calling Birmingham home! In fairness Priscila B, one half of the sizzling two-piece, does originally hail from Brazil and with that she brings a kohl-lined sultriness uncommon to the Jewellery Quarter’s surrounding streets, but it’s her and her partner-in-crime Mimi B’s no-doubt immaculate record collections that really back up the claim.
With a clear love for The Cramps, cutesy rock ‘n’ roll and skeletal, 60s garage-surf, the duo bash out homages to them all on just one lo-fi guitar and two drums. And, reminiscent of someone like Hinds back when they were Deers, what the pair lack in complexity they more than compensate with charm. And then there’s that album title. What a way to make your debut, erm, stand out! It’s a title that comes from a tongue-in-cheek appreciation of trashy rock and helps further set the tone for the enthusiastic tumble of two-minute tunes that follow.
Partly sung in Portuguese, we quickly encounter B-movie schlock rock that comes from the same place as “Human Fly”, scuzzy ballads about loving a man that’s part dog and dreamy little garage numbers strung along on nothing but a prayer. Then borrowing from Kim Gordon, “Let’s Be Bad” is however a glacially worded invitation to get freaky, housing the same sort of thrills as might flashing a stranger too. A fairly nonsensical ripple of Mimi’s budget drums and Priscila’s stream-of-conscious rhyming, “Lilly Is A Spy” keeps things fun, proving the earlier claim that “I Still Miss Lux” as it goes, itself another smile-inducing brothel-creeper.
A rare flash of modernity despite its distorted take on the Shangri-Las, “We Are Cherry Pickles” is sandwiched somewhere in the middle and it brings its spelled-out choruses bang up-to-date with a thinly veiled #metoo motif hidden amidst the call-and-response. Sure, this brief concession aside, Cherry Pickles may be a little one-dimensional, but it’s one hell of dimension all the same.
Best track: “Elvis Exorcist”
~Cherry Pickles Will Harden Your Nipples is released April 5th 2019 via PNKSLM.~