vinylfanatics.com

**Veronica Falls - Veronica Falls**
★★★★☆

There's something gloriously perverse about a band naming themselves after a fictional suicide pact, then proceeding to craft some of the most gorgeously melancholic indie-pop this side of Belle and Sebastian's golden years. Veronica Falls emerged from the ashes of several London underground acts – notably The Royal We and Sexy Kids – with members Roxanne Clifford, James Hoare, Marion Herbain, and Patrick Doyle converging in 2009 with a shared obsession for C86 jangle, girl-group harmonies, and the kind of morbid romanticism that would make Morrissey weep into his gladioli.

Their 2011 self-titled debut arrives like a love letter written in disappearing ink – beautiful, ephemeral, and tinged with an inevitable sense of loss. This is indie-pop with its heart firmly planted in the post-punk era, where bands like Talulah Gosh and The Pastels first demonstrated that you could marry sugar-sweet melodies with barbed-wire lyrics and create something genuinely transcendent.

The album opens with "Found Love in a Graveyard," and if that title doesn't immediately signal the band's fascination with romantic doom, then you haven't been paying attention. Built around a hypnotic guitar riff that Johnny Marr would kill for, it's a mission statement wrapped in three minutes of pristine pop perfection. Clifford and Herbain's intertwining vocals float above the jangle like ghosts at a séance, while the rhythm section provides the kind of motorik pulse that keeps everything from dissolving into complete ethereality.

"Bad Feeling" follows, and it's here that Veronica Falls truly announce themselves as inheritors of the indie-pop crown. The song bounces along on a bed of chiming guitars and deadpan vocals, with lyrics that catalogue everyday anxieties over a melody that could soundtrack a particularly melancholy episode of The Wonder Years. It's the kind of song that burrows into your consciousness and refuses to leave, like the best pop music always does.

The genius of Veronica Falls lies in their ability to make despair sound absolutely gorgeous. "Beachy Head" – named after the notorious suicide spot on England's south coast – shouldn't work as a piece of wistful pop music, but somehow the band transforms geographical morbidity into something approaching transcendence. The guitars chime and cascade while the vocals maintain an almost supernatural calm, as if the band has achieved some kind of zen acceptance of life's inherent tragedy.

"Come On Over" provides the album's most immediate hook, with a chorus that recalls the best of Sarah Records' catalogue filtered through a distinctly modern sensibility. It's indie-pop as comfort food – familiar enough to feel like coming home, but crafted with enough skill to avoid simple pastiche. The harmonies here are particularly stunning, with all four members contributing to a wall of voices that suggests both The Go-Betweens and early Stereolab.

Elsewhere, "Stephen" demonstrates the band's ability to stretch their sound beyond the three-minute pop song template, building layers of guitar and keyboard into something approaching shoegaze density, while "Right Side of My Brain" strips things back to their essential elements – voice, guitar, and the kind of melody that seems to exist outside of time.

The production, handled by Rory Attwell, captures the band at their most immediate. There's a live feel to these recordings that suggests four people in a room discovering these songs together, rather than the over-polished sheen that often afflicts indie-pop revivals. The guitars retain their bite, the vocals sit perfectly in the mix, and the whole thing sounds like it could have been recorded in 1987 or 2017 with equal conviction.

What makes Veronica Falls special is their refusal to treat their influences as museum pieces. This isn't nostalgic pastiche but a genuine evolution of the indie-pop form, taking the template established by bands like The Pastels and Heavenly and pushing it into new emotional territory. The morbid preoccupations that run through these songs feel genuine rather than affected, as if the band has found in indie-pop's formal constraints the perfect vehicle for exploring life's darker corners.

A decade on, Veronica Falls stands as both a perfect encapsulation of early 2010s indie sensibilities and a timeless statement of pop craft. It's an album that reveals new layers with each listen, confirming