Big Baby are about to release a new EP, Fizzy Cola, on Hidden Bay Records and Jigsaw Records, the follow-up to 2017’s Sour Patch on Egghunt Records. Opener ‘Cherry Coke’, the first song Big Baby wrote for this EP, sets the tone and introduces the soda and candy imagery of the title. Its indie pop sweetness is balanced with a lemon wedge of wistfulness, and the extra gear it finds after around a minute shows Big Baby are equally adept at doing sugar rush as they are syrupy nostalgia.

‘String of Pearls’ is another standout, a fun but semi-serious song about killing the long lonesome hours when a loved one is at work. “Sometimes I would get bored and do mundane tasks to pass the time,” Mislowsky describes. “I was untangling the strands of my string of pearls plant when the chorus just kind of fell out of my mouth.”

The EP closes on a breezy and nostalgic note with ‘Mid-June’, a bittersweet pop song that pines for a perfect early summer afternoon that is now consigned to the past. The song also has a fittingly crunchy finale as Big Baby flex their indie rock muscles one last time in a thundering last 15 seconds.

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“We are trying to make the ultimate pop album….Charles has got a really good voice…and I sound like a muppet….so it is kind of a Paul Simon and Kermit the Frog-funkel feel. We each wrote half of the 13 songs for SOLID GOLD COWBOYS. 6.5 for each of us…he wrote lyrics on one of my songs, and I on one his.”

In a way, Solid Gold Cowboys deals with the same sort of issues that Mike Pace described on his recent album Best Boy, comparing golden dreams with the insipid reality. But whereas Pace was singing with a longing for the promises of the 80s/90s, Unlikely Friends are more concerned with the present, singing about the banality of modern existence in a land where the Good Ol’ American Dream is a plastic model of an empty smile. This is captured perfectly in the first song, ‘Ride off into the Sunset’, where a normal man harbours dreams of cowboy freedom:

“I’m a twenty-first century American male,
I make a wheezing sound when I exhale,
I’ve got a supercharged chevy that I built myself,
it sits in my garage and has a musty smell.”

‘Soft Reputation’, the lead single, continues this trend with a video that manages to capture the essence of America with a compilation of baseball clips and adverts, a mixture of silly details and the very real glory of victory. This focus on silly but relatable details is a feature of the album (e.g. ‘Pizza Crust Trust’ – “you ate all of the pizza, except for the crust”), as are comments on the unsatisfying freedom felt by middle-class Americans (e.g. ‘Golden Telephone’ – “You can go anywhere that you want, there’s nothing here you really need”).

Of course, with this type of music the lyrics are only there for those who really want to listen. Others will sit back and bathe in the feel-good vibes. ‘Satellite Station’ and ‘Golden Telephone’ are breezy summer hits, shoegaze numbers with the fuzz removed, ‘Please Lorraine’ a big catchy love song with the melodramatic power-pop refrain, “Please Lorraine, pick up the pieces, make them whole again”. ‘Gold Hills Theme’ adds a spaghetti Western jangle (a hole in the pop market, I believe) and closer ‘Gold Coat Marauders’ again pines for a vision of America that has disappeared or maybe never existed. “Pull me up, dust me down and take me to the place where I thought I was from”.

You can grab the the cassette from Mirror Universe Tapes, the CD from Jigsaw Records or download a digital copy from the Unlikely Friends Bandcamp page.

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