Homecoming – The Teenagers (2007, Merok Records)
The Teenagers started off life as a joke on the pages of MySpace. During Christmas 2005 they created a page for a fictional band and posted lyrics on the page every time someone commented on something. By autumn 2006 they had 10,000 followers, and the lyrics had music put to them and the rest is history.
When the first photos and press releases of The Teenagers first emerged we found out that they were French (I mean the vocals tell us that much), and they weren’t teenagers at all – this folks is why MySpace was rubbish, no one was who they said they were, I’m fairly sure my own MySpace page describes me as a 17 year old female tortoiseshell cat, with one bad eye. The Teenagers were also obsessed with sex, snogging and late night romantic hand in hand walks on the beach, but you got the impression that they only said that in order to do more snogging and sex.
They also swore constantly on all over their songs, and didn’t really care too much about it. Take ‘Homecoming’, for example. This was a song about a French lad, who may or may not be pretending to be English, whilst visiting some family in America. There he meets a girl, who may or may not be his cousin. On day two, he tells us bluntly, he fucked her and apparently it was wild. How very rude, although not as rude as the chorus, though. ‘Homecoming’ sounds like kind of like what New Order would sound like if they were fronted by Jacques Dutronc and he was groping someone as he sang. Which, actually, would be pretty bloody amazing, the sound, not the groping that is.
Musically, ‘Homecoming’ is quite lofi drone pop, which easily, erm, straddles, that middle ground between dance punk and pop punk. It has an infectious chorus, which if you are anything like me, you have to stop yourself from singing when the youngsters are around. I would still file under pretty damn good though.
Here’s some more Teenager perv pop as the NME called it.
Sunset Beach – The Teenagers (2007, Merok Records)
No Badger Required 