EVERY GENRE PROJECT - October 10 - Twee Pop

Genre of the Day - Twee Pop

Album of the Day - Time ‘n’ Place by Kero Kero Bonito (2018)

If there was a twee Olympics, Portland would surely be the first city to host the games. I feel justified in saying this because I have a twee-adjacent visitor by way of the Oregonian city visiting me this weekend, and a Silverlake expedition is in our future, one of the few serviceably twee neighborhoods in the decidedly untwee locale of Los Angeles. Music is among most people’s primary form of comfort; twee pop is like a floral faded blanket you pull out when the October chill starts setting in as you watch the trees change from your window. As people relish in the newfound twee renaissance from the 2010s (see the obsession with Juno), itself a revival of ‘80s tweeness, it’s high time twee pop got its adorable little genre feature.

The Empress of Twee, Zooey Deschanel. The two Os in her name recall We Bought A Zoo, one of the tweest movies of all time.

Indie music has generally correlated to the startup attitude of post-punk rock, but pop has held equal importance ever since jangle pop’s sunny origins in the ‘80s in spaces like the C86 compilations. Twee music evokes a sense of springtime gardening, when the sprouts shoot up; their potential and robustness may not be fully realized yet, but there’s beauty in the process of being nurtured. Groups that concentrated and distilled this sweetness with more grams-of-sugar per serving, often influenced by a sense of nostalgia for the novice bubblegum pop girl groups of the ‘60s, coalesced into what became twee pop in the mid-’80s as an often female-fronted facet of the post-punk scene. 

Twee in itself is a word of tweeful origin, a reference to a childlike stumble in pronouncing the word “sweet.” Twee pop is unabashedly, yet bashfully, wistful and wondrous, sweetly demurring nostalgic lyrics over dreamy guitar melodies and unpolished, naturalist male-female harmonies. The sonic world was often a clever feint; several acts like the Marine Girls (co-fronted by Everything But the Girl’s Tracey Thorn!), Dolly Mixture, and Heavenly tackled harder-edged realities in their lyrics, balancing blissful melodic escapism with reality and reclaiming female-fronted and queer rock’s capacity to tackle any subject matter without capitulating to masculine ideals of how rock should sound. 

Kero Kero Bonito was not a group I previously associated with tweeness, but the people I know who love them perhaps should’ve clued me in. The acclaimed group’s 2018 “Time ‘n’ Place” makes good on its name; not every song here is a spoonful of twee sugar—there’s a time and place to feel comfortable and be twee and free. It may not be on the blistering glam metal freakout of “Outside,” and Weezer—or Tweezer, today—feels like a primary influence on “Only Acting.” The chimes punctuating the hypnagogic dream pop of “Dump” is a lurid environment as Bonito sings of the industrial jungle. Vocalist Sarah Bonito’s lilting voice projects a simultaneous wisdom and innocence best captured in the poignant circularity of nostalgia being catapulted into the future in “Dear Future Self.” And for the record, my co-listener confirms to be quite Portland; a twe-xpert stamp of approval if there ever was one.