The U.K. duo of jack-of-all-trades musician
Will Turner
and co-singer and -songwriter
Georgie Fuller
(who expand to a five-piece for live dates),
the Heavy Heavy
landed a record deal with
ATO
and appearances on U.S. TV shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live! and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on the strength of their debut EP,
Life and Life Only
. Early adopters of the group will be happy to learn that the buoyant presence and nostalgia-activating charm that won
this early attention is even more abundant on their full-length debut,
One of a Kind
. It finds the project drawing on an ever-expanding pool of familiar sounds stemming from the mid- to late '60s and spun through a hooky, harmonic mid-fi filter. The musical touchstones in play range from the raw, strutting rock of the early British Invasion to the hazier psychedelic pop/rock and adjacent folk-rock of acts such as
the Byrds
and
the Mamas & the Papas
, with a bit of gritty
Creedence Clearwater Revival
twang thrown in before they're through. If that sounds like a lot, it not only clicks but goes down really easy, right from the album's invigorating opening track, "One of a Kind," which tends toward the early
Beatles
-- or maybe
the Dave Clark Five
? -- region of their musical-inspo Venn diagram. Regardless of reference points, its chafed vocal harmonies, rumbling blues undergirding, carefree guitar solos, and howling harmonica get things off to a spirited start. They keep the enthusiasm going on second track "Happiness," an early single whose sunshiny bittersweetness topped triple-A radio charts before the album's release. The record's generous 12-song track list mostly continues in kind, with slight diversions into more-anxious psychedelic pop on an entry like "Feel," pastoral, keyboard-infused pop on "Wild Emotion," Woodstock-ian blues-rock on the
Fuller
-led "Dirt," and trippy, meandering atmospherics on the especially
Mamas & the Papas
-approached "Salina." While
do seem to lift the occasional riff, the songs here sound like recordings lost in time for the most part, and the songcraft exceeds "lost outtake" status, with songs instead demanding headline standing of their own. ~ Marcy Donelson