Gay Singles

From the slightly rough and ready insouciant girl vocals and the faux-anguished deadpan lead vocals (which occasionally lapse into emotive spoken bits), Hunx And His Punx is a pretty good transposition of the Shangrai Las to the post-lo-fi/pre-hifi 21st century. Chief of the Hunx, Seth Bogart, has an appealing touch of the Violent Femmes (another batch of girl-band fetishists) in his nasal whine and the disharmonious but melodic backing vocals crunch with slight distortion as the guitars clang and twang, the organs ominously sustain, and the drums girlfully keep the beat. And it’s filled, of course, with lyrics about boyfriends, misunderstood youth, teenageness and boys named (what other names are there?) Johnny. It all coalesces rather pleasantly into a strangely authentic homage to the teen-idealising pop music of the early sixties.