It begins with a ménage à trois and ends with a doomed office romance. No, not the latest instalment of Fifty Grades of Shite, but the debut album from Laois four-piece Adela & The Meanits. Lead singer Adela Meally has gathered a band of like-minded multi-instrumentalists around her after at least a half dozen years of going it alone. A Balcony TV favourite going back to 2007, some of Meallys’ songs from this album seem to have had a previous stripped-back life before the current band got their hands on them. The quartet debuted at Electric Picnic in 2009 and as well as jaunts around the usual festival circuit, their latest endeavour saw them attempt to play 32 gigs in 32 counties over the month of August.
‘Kinda Wild’ is a light-hearted, double-tandem bike ride through pop, ska, country, jazz, M.O.R radio-friendly fluff, calypso and Brtitpop revivalism. The fun begins with Party For Three, a PG-rated ska-lite threesome saga, with Meally affecting an English accent punctuated with lively yelps and squeals. It brings to mind Sleeper’s Louise Wener, with a playful melodica anchoring the whole lot and you would be forgiven for mistaking the Laois native for a transplanted Londoner. It’s often the simplest of melodies that have the ability to take up residence in your head and this one accomplishes the feat, settling in and resurfacing occasionally when it takes the notion. And there’s nothing you can do about it.
New single Andy follows, a slight girl-band type number inspired by a cross-dressing friend that channels Lola via Camera Obscura. “I think about the stars at night but that’s a lie/ I’m thinking of you” is the song’s sweet denouement, before the nursery rhyme intro of My Ego gives way to a breezy, skip-a-long calypso rhythm. The briefest of finger-popping jazz breakdowns adds colour to the mix, rounding off this opening trilogy of catchy pop numbers.
A generic Looking At You is lifted by some fine drum and violin work, and indeed the album as a whole benefits from the energetic and skilful musicianship on display. The band prove themselves adept at flitting from one style to the next as the tunes change from the jazzy Cavan Fever to the country inflections of Kinda Wild (“It’s fun to feel kinda wild” – the album’s sentiment in a sentence) and knees-up Daddy’s Girl. The latter song comes with the added comedy of three blokes affirming “Oh I’m a daddy’s girl”
The lyrics throughout tumble over each other in giddy fashion, a breathless and good-humoured dialogue style put to good use in Hanging Around and its depiction of rose-tinted summer daze. Adela & The Meanits have released a fine summer album…just in time for autumn. It’s inoffensive stuff really; equal parts twee and knowing and with a handful of memorable melodies, your enjoyment of this one will depend on your tolerance for relentlessly upbeat cheeky lad & lass-ery.