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Hello Lovers’ debut EP, Vanity Fair, begins dramatically and with no warning. Along with the first notes of piano and cello, lead-singer J.C. King belts suddenly: “Fear like flies about the wrist / have you my dear have wanted of this?” It’s an appropriately unsettling and brash start to an album that is relentless and restless at every turn. King’s sweeping, operatic vocals fly and dip with variable inflections, combining with his bitingly direct, yet poetic, lyrics to create something that is harsh and brutal, yet undeniably beautiful and alluring. The songs shift internally with an abrupt grace, baroque in their construction, and dance between melancholy and mania behind the cello and violin of Mollie Fischer and Masha Poloskov, respectively.
King’s mesmerizing voice is the driving force of the songs, and his singing most closely parallels Antony’s in its dynamics. Yet whereas Antony’s gentle tremors pitch for the heavenly sublime, King seems determined to wallow in the filth and glory of the terrestrial and embodied. “And you said you were a sailor / and at the sea you saw / when we became an island oh we / to fight and fuck and bite and suck and rear and buck / all undone,” he sings with staccatoed rhythm on opener “My Girlfriend is a Gay Pirate.” For all their harshness, these are still undeniably love songs; they celebrate the body in all its raw attraction and crassness, finding wonderment in looking down rather than up. For example, the rusty and crooked sax of Andy Hadaway that accompanies King’s cabaret trills on “Good News for People with Tiny Black Hearts” seems to almost mock the smoky jazz of Billie Holiday, yet intentionally so (as the smooth drop towards the end of the song proves) in order to revel in the imperfection, to insist we are not fully in control of ourselves and continually conflicted creatures of passion.
Vanity Fair thus seems an appropriate title in its allusion to Thackeray’s materialistic masterpiece and the original bizarre of sin presented in Bunyon’s Pilgrim’s Progress. There is little call to redemption in Hello Lovers’ songs, no progress towards transcendence. Rather, King and company commit themselves to a glorification, and even performance, of the embodied, an exploration of touch and smell and taste that starts from a recognition that we are already part of the Fair. Yet instead of shying away in disgust or satirical dismissal, Hello Lovers embraces the excess, the unseen beauty of the filth and fury to find, perhaps, the revelation around us rather than beyond us. Vanitas Vanitatum! indeed.
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