Best of Month: AotY #19: Wet Leg's self-titled record via Domino
Last year, when I featured a most anticipated section, I named Wet Leg among the top five. Secretly, they were the one I was looking forward to most of all. When the record hit I saw a lot of negative reactions from listeners saying it didn’t meet their expectations, they didn’t live up to their singles and they were far bigger than they deserve to be. Well, while I think the singles did show the best of the record too early and maybe I am a bit baffled just by how huge Wet Leg got in such a short time, I will continue to enthusiastically defend this band.
It's hard to not show your whole hand when you release half your record prior to street date, but my defense there is this. “Ur Mum,” while being a single, was released only days prior to the record, has an incredible hook and energy and one of the strongest moments in a song in general from the past year. That and the band still had songs like “Convincing” waiting to be discovered to those who went beyond the initial tracks. It’s also easy to see a band that got signed, got big festivals and tours and rose up pretty fast as something to laugh at, but I challenge you to ignore, beyond abuse of course, what you feel about how a band arrived and just see good music for good music.
For me personally Wet Leg is actually helping me clear a lot of blind spots in my musical history. I run this blog going off of what I listened to in high school and college and how I’m carrying that into adulthood, most of that was all new music. If a band referencing David Bowie and The Moffatts sonically and lyrically makes me recognize those songs on the radio where I didn’t before does it matter if that’s how I arrived there? Or that I arrived there at all.
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