Score: 6.5/10
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It’s been a while — like I’m talking since like Six Pence None the Richer or freakin’ Luscious Jackson — that I’ve come across music and found it not so much bad music as just freakin’ GIRLS’ music.
That is to say, there are some good things going on with Long Neck, a quartet (three of which go by just a first name along with female lead singer Lily Mastrodimos) from Jersey City. This drummer, et. al., “John” can really shred, although again, his skills aren’t really shown off — he’s just given one fill at the end of “Mine/Yours” in which he rips it like Dave Grohl.
As for the music itself, it’s cheeky pop like the Blues Traveler cut in Blues Brothers 2000, every bit romantically fawning and enrapt except that it’s a female delivering it, with backing electric guitar fuzz this time approximately the intensity of So Much for the Afterglow-era Everclear turned down from eight on the volume knob to about five.
Look, I put Shenendoah freakin’ Davis on my list, a female singer/songwriter who bills herself as “classical” (the arrangements are a bit orchestral though just in the way that Sufjan Stevens is), and I’ve listened to Souvenirs repeatedly. In fact, it’s great Friday night winter music (for a 30-something, that is). I’m telling you that the people who will primarily enjoy Will This Do? will be girls aged 13 to 23. But they might not be worse for it.
“Elizabeth” is a decent pop tune, but to be honest, this Lily Mastrodimos seems like a little bit of an egomaniac. She’s got a tendency to over-anunciate words in her vocals, I wouldn’t necessarily classify what she’s got as a “sense of humor,” and the quality of her voice can come across as just a bit vapid, as if by singing she’s celebrating her talents, not the power of her subject matter. “Matriarch” delivers us refreshingly into lugubrious balladry and thereby essentially saves the album, though I still don’t like Mastrodimos’ voice that much — very Angel Olsen/median-late-’10s-indie-sounding. But, seeing as they bill themselves as “folk” (ironic since that emo pu**y Postmodern Addiction claimed to be “rock” while just whining on an acoustic guitar), I don’t particularly expect to listen to the rest of this album and find anything in the way of interesting instrumentation like harpsichord or guiro, so I guess I won’t.