Sixpence None the Richer - Sixpence None the Richer (1997)

I generally try to fit the album I'm talking about to time and place and because it's summer I wanted to go for something sunny, happy and lightweight. This album is exactly that. Though I'm not a target audience for this band and for this record, I always enjoyed this kind of music and it's an important part of my taste. Sixpence are a christian-adjacent soft rock/pop band that on the surface play simple verse-chorus-verse radio tunes, but if you try to analyse their songwriting, you'll get surprised how much weird stuff they can fit in these catchy songs...

Their christian affiliations supposidely come from the lyrics, but since I'm not that much of a lyrics guy so I've found about it all relatively late and literally from either Wikipedia or RYM. The songs here can all be pretty much classified into 3 different categories: quiet tender "ballads", sunny jangly song and weird stuff. Although in this type of releases all the track often melt into one blob of vibe and sound that is hard to analyse track by track, this isn't that much of a problem here as some tracks stand out. I mean, each song is very catchy, there are no forgettable tracks, it's just that still all of them are exceptionally similar in vibe.

Right from the start, Leigh delivers an outstanding vocal performance in "We Have Forgotten". The sunny, sentimental atmosphere gets established right here for the entire tracklist. Not only that, but the affore-mentioned quirky compositional elements start here too, as the chorus uses an unconventional accent structure that always catches me off-guard. The verses feature some shoegazey guitar patterns too! The song just establishes this release as an interesting listen. This all continues in "Anything" that adds some slightly dissonant chords that together with masterful vocals have wonderful effect. I just love how melodic and elegant this band sound here. The smooth transition leads to a jazzy "Waiting Room", full of "acquired taste" type of melodies and vocal phrases. The song also features orchestration, which further adds to the grandiose feel.

Then the run of deep-cut songs ends and makes way for the big hit - "Kiss Me". Oh boy I love this song soooo much. I remember hearing it throughout my childhood in some cereal commercial, on a radio and overall in the wild. Then it disappeared, as when I was a teen I went too far in prog and thrash metal rabbithole to be interested in such songs. When my girlfriend has shown it to me couple of years ago, it was like something long gone has awakened in me. I love such songs with my whole heart. "Kiss Me" is a sunny pastoral anthem that always cheers me up and gets me in a cheerful "carpe diem" mood. It may be overplayed and all, but it means a whole lot to me and it made me discover this fantastic LP.

The pastoral vibe is continued by the next track - "Easy to Ignore" which adds some country/southern rock elements to the mix. I'm probably the first and the last person ever to make that comparison, but it kinda reminds me of the band The Big Picture and their hit lost media tune called "Just Passin' By", better known on the internet as "The World Was so Easy". The violins are especially similar! The most surprising and simultanously the weirdest song here is "Puedo Escribir". Nobody told me that "The Kiss Me Album" features a dramatically dark, folky song in 11/8 sung in spanish! My mind was blown when I heard this. I mean this could be a Mars Volta song! Crazy stuff... It's definitely a highlight of this record.

We're back to the usual sunshine indie music with "I Can't Catch You" which sounds simultanously like every shoegaze-adjacent rock band that you hear in a vaguely gay pub at 11pm after 2 beers and like Cranberries. And both are big complements! I like this type of sound very much. Gotta love the tambourine work especially! I'm always bought when I hear tambourine drums... More bands should incorporate it into the sound as imo it hardly ever sounds bad.

Unfortunately the pacing gets kinda janky at this point, but the songs are nice nevertheless. We have a slow ballad "Lines on my Earth" with Leigh's signature sensitive vocals, another wonderful Cranberries-style track "Sister, Mother" which always gets stuck in my head and exotic "I Won't Stay Long" with another seamless transition (wow, this album is such a curiosity!) into "Love". I like all of these songs and all of them are very well written, memorable and atmospheric. I especially enjoy "Sister, Mother" for its steady but still very bright sound and "Love" for its groovy bassline. Intially it kinda sounds like something that Porcupine Tree would do in their Stupid Dream/Lightbulb Sun era, but then it gets more yearning, emotional and dark.

"Moving On" feels like a closure that sums up the album. I really enjoy the choruses here - they build in a kinda hypnotic and manic way only the release in a very bright way over and over again. All the instruments support each other and work nice with the orchestriation which sounds so clean and powerful. It's a nice summary of the whole musical landscape Sixpence provided on this LP.

But this isn't the end! The band covered The La's "There She Goes" as a true closing track of this album on some releases, and I gotta say this could really be my absolute favourite cover ever. It's brighter, sunnier and fits the band's style exceptionally well. I vastly prefer it over the original and I come back to it all the time.

I love albums like this. They always seem very surface-level and mediocore at the first glance, but if you just give them a chance to indulge with you, you'll discover a whole new musical places that were always worth visiting. I always give such albums a chance and I try to talk about more of them in the future, because they are a goldmine of wonderful and interesting music curiosities.