Album Review: Patio, Collection

The legend goes that Patio were a band before they ever started making music. Loren DiBlasi was a music journalist who wanted to be a bassist but couldn’t play. Her pal Lindsey-Paige McCloy was a decent guitarist, and the duo recruited Alice Suh, a college friend of McCloy’s who had just started taking drum lessons.

Taking its cues from the likes of Pavement and other similarly shambolic indie stalwarts, this second album is sprightly and short, brimming over with sharp slices of lazy, sun-kissed indie, complete with dual vocals, off kilter melodies, unusual time-signatures and staccato bursts of buzzsaw guitar.

At their best, like the quietly catchy ‘Patience’ and ‘The Sun’, their blend of indolent drums, insistent guitar and laidback vocals recalls some of the best indie outfits from across the Atlantic in the early ‘90s, blending The Breeders, Belly and Throwing Muses with the quirkiness of Juliana Hatfield.

The bass-driven ‘En Plein Air’ comes across like a dancefloor-friendly Pixies-lite, while the call-and-response vocals on ‘Either Way’ worm their way into your head with ease. Stop-start slacker anthem ‘Sixpence’ is angular and catchy at the same time, ending with the killer line, “I wanna be the greatest, but not today”.

Sometimes, things get a little too chaotic and ‘Routine’ is a little too lo-fi, sounding more like a demo rather than a fully-fledged recording. But in the main, this is idiosyncratic indie that reveals new layers with each listen.

8/10

Out now