PopSyndicate.com

Charlotte Sometimes, who takes her name from the same children’s book by Penelope Farmer that inspired the Cure, may list among her influences Cypress Hill, Jeff Buckley and Fiona Apple but in reality, her songs resemble the angst pop of Lucy Woodward more than anything else. Light, bouncy and fluffy, her sound flies in the face of her shadowy philosophy (she claims to like the “shadier” things in life, like “spiders and valium”).

Her flagship song on her first album, 1918: Waves and the Both of Us, is “How I Could Just Kill a Man”. It has a poppy sound that will make you want to shake your booty and dance, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The lyrics are fun; the song has a happy feel that is more than a little infectious. Her titles have the same whimsical quality of Fall Out Boy’s titles; clever, almost punish (“Sweet Valium High”). She occasionally drops the random curse word, but it’s so against the grain of her sound that it gives her songs an almost Emily Dickensonian slant-rhyme sound.

On her website, Charlotte Sometimes talks about her identity problems (another of her many tie-ins to the book, about a girl in a boarding school who switches places in time with another young girl who lives in 1918, hence the album title), but based on her cd, she’s found her sound. Her songs sound like the soundtrack to a Forever 21 ad, young girls with perfect hair and glossy lips frolicking in the sunshine. Even “Sweet Valium High”, with it’s angry lyrics about being forgotten and abandoned, sound like the perfect summer-kissed road trip soundtrack. She may have been the “weird girl” in her hometown of Wall, New Jersey, but in the music scene, she fits right in with the likes of Feist and Kate Nash. And like them, I expect that we’ll be hearing a lot more about Charlotte Sometimes.

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