RFI: Some singy all-girl band?

oooh that sounds good and i have no idea what you're talking about ; )

the Dixie Cups

Abbott all those descriptions run completely counter to who it really is, which is the now-defunct NYC band My Favorite. The 2-disc set (3 EPs / remixes) was called The Happiest Days of Our Lives.

Lyric = "The ghost of dead teenagers sing to me while I am dancing."

worth checking out?

Highly recommended by me, by the way -- there's a thread on them around here somewhere.

It's 4 guys, 1 girl, vocal duties split m/f; nothing electroclashy about them. They started off as an 80s pastiche band, really -- Smiths and OMD and Cure and pretty much every floofy new-wave treat bookish Long Island kids would get excited about, straight down to having songs about John Hughes movies and stuff ... but they were such great songwriters while they were at it that they managed to kinda blossom out into doing it as a terrific thing in itself. The song your bf is quoting is a kinda New Order / OMD dance track called "Homeless Club Kids," a little atypical for not having much guitar stuff going -- tracks like "Le Monstre" and "Burning Hearts" and "The Black Cassette" are maybe more where they're normally at.

my favorite (now defunct) were one of the best bands to come out of long island ever. 'love at absolute zero,' their first full-length, is one of my favorite albums of all time, full of big synth choruses and brat-pack references.

also, they are not all-girl. andrea vaughn handles lead vocals, but her counterpoint was a male singer, michael race.

xpost yeah Surmounter I loved them to death. But it's mostly a question of whether you like the idea of hearing someone recreate a nostalgic dreamworld of teenage Anglophile new-wavery. Personally I (a) like how hard the main guy works to do that, (b) think they've written some really amazing songs along the way, and (c) have a soft spot for bands who are working really hard to accomplish something really skewed and personal, especially when -- as with Michael Grace in this band -- it's occasionally super funny/lame.

I am psyched to see that Maura shares the love! Yeah, Love at Absolute Zero is terrific. I almost feel bad pointing them out as pastiche artists back then, because no matter how much stylistic stuff was totally 1985, the songs were exquisitely written, in a way that's way past cut-and-paste borrowing or imitation.

Although the chorus on the song "The Happiest Days of Our Lives" is, weirdly enough, totally sparked off Bryan Adams "Summer of '69," which you can prove concretely, because they didn't even bother much changing Adams' "those were the best days of our lives" lyric.

(haha nabisco i played them on wnur every week)

(And you're friends with Andrea now, right? Who is really, really nice. Also one of my favorite things is that I have Grace's "card" somewhere, which turns out to be a French vocabulary flash card with his info written on in pen -- you couldn't make up a better My Favorite business card.)

By the way, two reasons I feel guilty about the "pastiche" tag, true as it may be: (a) if they were doing similar stuff with influences that were fashionable today, we wouldn't say boo; and (b) when you actually try to name the acts they should sound like, nothing seems particularly right, and I think that's because they've managed to capture the spirit of whole record collections -- they don't really sound like the Smiths or OMD or New Order, but they've found some 1985 sweet spot that's ... well, the closest I can come to pegging it is the Psychedelic Furs circa "Pretty in Pink."