The past is a foreign country, and it's where the Gigolo Aunts choose to live. "Last time we were here we were touring with The Wonder Stuff and this next song was the theme to Game On," says chief Aunt Dave Gibbs, vividly evoking the cultural wasteland that was 1994. There's been a few changes round these parts since the New York quartet scored a lone hit with Where I Find My Heaven, but their guileless power-pop treatises still refuse to acknowledge significant developments in music beyond 1974 and the second Big Star album.
The Gigolo Aunts have had a rough five years, so one can understand them clinging to what they know best. Mired in litigation that's prevented them from making a follow-up to '94's Flippin' Out album until now, their spirits were sustained by contributing songs to film and television soundtracks. Marketing analysts doubtless calculated that the Aunts' hook-heavy tunebook and a tendency towards the relentlessly upbeat would strike the necessary chords with America's aspirational bright young things, and so it proved. How they failed to land the Friends theme is a mystery.
But, rescued from Tin Pan Alley oblivion by Counting Crows leader Adam Duritz, who signed them to his label, Gigolo Aunts are back and singing the same old songs, albeit with different words and titles. The likes of Everything Is Wrong and C'mon, C'mon demonstrate that though his band's personnel may have altered slightly during the wilderness years, Gibbs's aptitude for bittersweet euphoria remains undiminished. As does the fact that the best Gigolo Aunts songs are the ones other people wrote.
"This is my favourite," gushes Dave, as Duritz and his guitar-playing Crow Dan Vickrey swell the ranks for an encore blast through Serious Drugs, a tale of twisted romantic obsession with a melody to die for. Written for the BMX Bandits by Superstar's Joe McAlinden and Teenage Fanclub's Norman Blake, next to this acute articulation of the pleasure in pain, the Gigolo Aunts's own efforts are revealed for the advertising fodder they are. Yet as ever, the band's performance is incandescent. Perhaps they've been playing it so long they actually do believe it's one of theirs.
