Following a couple of low-key teaser transmissions over the past year or so, Dutch duo The Hobknobs finally get round to a long-player of emotionally rich but minimally constructed indiepop that makes nods to the greats - both contemporary and legendary - while effortlessly establishing their own idiomatic take on the form. The pair are of course experienced hands when it comes to this kind of thing, Yaël Dekker having sung in wiry artpunk group The Klittens and Arie van Vilet having led Lewsberg to some underground notoriety with a decade of definitely independent practice. It’s to the latter that The Hobknobs express the greater affinity, fusing the Velvets and K Records in a form of deceptive minimalist pop that you might falsely assume easily rolls off the tongue until you attempt the same thing yourself and get it horribly wrong. Outside of the music itself, what also chimes with van Vilet’s work in Lewsberg is the little sideways take on life that litter the lyrics, uncanny observations of the minutiae of the world, couched in humour and a gently nudged sense of the profound. The traded vocals form a neat feeling of domestic dialogue where the banal transfigures into something more meaningful in its sharing and a private joke can become the centrepiece of the song (take, for example, the reappropriation of the melody from the theme song for 90s kids TV show, Round the Twist). Mostly, however, these are addicting earworms that find a very immediate means of lodging in the memory, tricking you into feeling you might have actually known of these songs long before their accrediting to The Hobknobs. It’s in that manner that the group establish their own form of classicism.
FFO: Cindy, Lewsberg, Velvet Underground, Young Marble Giants
