Wet Leg: Moisturizer review – Doritos, Davina McCall and dumb fun from British indie's big breakout band

The Guardian

3 days ago

Moisturizer concludes with a track called U and Me at Home. In it, Rhian Teasdale sings about the pleasures of doing nothing over guitars that bend in and out of tune in the style patented by My Bloody Valentine. Nothing much happens in the song – there's some discussion about possibly getting a takeaway, and a brief nod to the 'happy comatose' effects of weed – but it does feature a few lines that function as a kind of Wet Leg origin story. 'Maybe we could start a band as some kind of joke,' sings Teasdale. 'Well, that didn't quite go to plan … now we've been stretched across the world'.
You don't need to be a member of Wet Leg and aware of the circumstances of their formation – apparently the result of a conversation between Teasdale and guitarist Hester Chambers while on a ferris wheel – to feel slightly surprised at their continued success and how hotly anticipated their second album has turned out to be. Their breakthrough debut single Chaise Longue was a great song, but it carried a hint of the left-field novelty hit, the kind of funny-weird track that temporarily ignites indie disco dancefloors and festival audiences before it and its authors recede swiftly into memory: the latest addition to a pantheon that includes Electric Six's Gay Bar, Liam Lynch's United States of Whatever, and – one for readers of a certain age – the Sultans of Ping's Where's Me Jumper? But that wasn't what happened at all.
Wet Leg's eponymous debut album turned out to be stuffed with both hooks of a kind you don't really get in British alt-rock these days and witty, sharply-drawn vignettes of life among the provincial hipsters of the Isle of Wight – Wet Dream, which turned into an even bigger hit than Chaise Longue, cast a weary eye over a Vincent Gallo-obsessed letch. The album went gold in the UK, made the US Top 20 and won two Brits and two of the three Grammys it was nominated for.
Something that was a 'kind of joke' has ended up a remarkably big deal: at one juncture, Teasdale and Chambers became so weary of inquiries as to when their second album was coming out, they took to telling interviewers it was already finished, when they hadn't started work on it. That said, Moisturizer does not seem much like the work of a band nervous about following up an unexpectedly huge debut. It's a very confident record indeed, from the leering grin Teasdale sports on its cover, to the big, knowingly dumb garage rock riffs that gust through Catch These Fists and Pillow Talk, to the dramatic shift in its lyrics. The goings-on in Ryde's indie crowd have been supplanted as chief subject matter. 'Hello, 999, what's your emergency / Well, the thing is … I'm in love,' gasps Teasdale on opener CPR, which pretty much sets the album's tone. You hear an awful lot about her blossoming relationship with her partner, and indeed her surprise at the discovery her sexuality was more fluid than she previously thought, the latter expressed in questions sprinkled across the songs: 'Is this fun? Is this a vibe?' 'The fuck am I doing?' 'Am I dreaming?' 'What's a guy like me to do?'
It means that the kind of barbed put-downs that peppered their debut are thinner on the ground, although there's a great one on Catch These Fists, a withering dismissal of a would-be suitor in a nightclub: 'He don't get puss, he get the boot / I saw him sipping on Dark Fruit.' And besides, you hardly want for smart, funny lyrics, their power amplified by Teasdale's hugely expressive voice slipping from singing to speech, from careful enunciation to a chewy drawl, from snarl to wide-eyed gasp. Davina McCall channels a rush of lust through the Big Brother presenter's catchphrase 'I'm coming to get you'; Don't Speak frames romance through the unlikely metaphor of tortilla chips: 'You're the sand between my toes … We go together like salsa and Doritos.'
Musically, it shifts from Pokemon's synth-y 80s pop rock to the kind of Kate Bush-influenced balladry in which Teasdale dabbled when she was still a singer-songwriter who called herself Babushka Baba Yaga, on 11:21. But its primary currency is early 90s US alt-rock – the ghosts of Pixies, Belly and the Breeders haunt its lurching dynamic shifts and cocktails of sticky pop melodies and raging guitars – and, more unexpectedly, the angular riffs of Elastica, particularly pronounced on Pond Song and Catch These Fists.
Indeed, Wet Leg's influences are never far from the surface of their music and you could argue that all this amounts to yet more canny restructuring of the past in a genre that's made recycling its business for the last 30 years. But it's far harder to quibble with the power of the end result. Whatever's inspired them, the songs are supremely punchy, the tunes contagious: Moisturizer is a blast. One suspects that, for Wet Leg, things will continue to not go quite to plan for some time yet.
Moisturizer is released via Domino on 11 July