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ESSENTIAL NEW MUSIC

Essential New Music: Alex Lahey’s “I Love You Like A Brother”

This feisty young Melburnian released a crackerjack, all-killer, five-song EP in last year’s B-Grade University, and she has now repeated the feat with, specifically, the front end of her full-length debut. It’s not that Brother’s back side—which tends toward more elaborate, polished and generically poppy arrangements—is particularly bad or even all that much of a stylistic departure. But none of it’s particularly memorable, either, especially next to all the fizzy, bounding energy and gonzo shout-along hooks crammed into side one. Picking up the ball from B-Grade’s brash, bratty standout “I Don’t Think You Like People Like Me,” the album’s defiantly pop-punky first half touches on distance-challenged romance (love-blitzed opener “Every Day’s The Weekend,” the touching, expansive “Backpack”), self-care fails, siblinghood (the unexpectedly literal, bashed-out title track) and her love/hate for the city of Perth—all with characteristic witty, everygal charm. And gauche as it may seem for someone signed to a prestige indie like Dead Oceans, Lahey’s just way more compelling (and fun) when channeling Avril Lavigne (with a splash of prime Lily Allen in the attitude department) than she is rehashing Best Coast.

—K. Ross Hoffman