Peggy Sue - Fossils and Other Phantoms

Despite its rough lo-fi edges, bare bones production and lyrics that ache with bruised emotions, Fossils and Other Phantoms (June 1, Yep Roc) from British anti-folk trio Peggy Sue finds its own dark beauty in the strikingly direct harmonies of Katy Young and Rosa Slade. This is music of bitter winds and storm clouds, raw and biting in pain and melancholy as if any protection against the exposed elements is stripped clean. Guitar, mandolin, accordion are the backdrop for Young and Slade's paired vocals, drummer Olly Joyce adding percussion that moves from brushed snare to rhythmic firepower as harmonies bend, break and soar unfettered.

Recorded in London and New York's Lower East Side, Fossils is a disarming mix of PJ Harvey, Indigo Girls and Kimya Dawson, the scruffy cousin of U.K. neo-acoustic thrush Laura Marling and pub-folk skifflers Mumford and Sons. Lead track "Watchman" sums up the Peggy Sue style with intertwined harmonies and shadowy minor chords knocking up against Joyce's thumping bass drum and scattershot cacophony. "The Shape We Made" is a gem of acoustic punk simplicity as single plucked strings give way to slowly building tension, vocals drifting from a sweet whisper to impassioned shout. Says Q: "(An) amiably unvarnished debut...a bit punky, a bit folky, even a bit rockabilly, but always refreshingly themselves." Recommended.

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Peggy Sue - "Watchman" (from the album Fossils and Other Phantoms)

Peggy Sue - "The Shape We Made" (from the album Fossils and Other Phantoms)

Photo Credit: Patrick Ford

With its kitchen sink approach to making music and off-kilter duets, Brighton UK duo Peggy Sue’s first full length release Fossils and Other Phantoms is a record to satisfy anyone’s gypsy wanderlust. Following in the anti-folk tradition, Fossils and Other Phantoms explores delicate and dark themes of self-worth, regret, longing—the kind of melancholy that creeps into your bones in the middle of the night well after a breakup or the death of a loved one—all riding over drummer Olly’s urgent blasts of percussion and the firework pop of Rosa and Katy’s searing vocals. “There’s kind of theme that runs throughout the album, because it was written over one period of time,” Rosa said. “The process of writing songs is very therapeutic. It usually tends to come at a time when you need the outlet for something … There’s quite a lot about what remains after something’s ended and … absences that still occupy spaces and remnants of things that have passed.”

The record was written and recorded over the last year in Brooklyn with The Dodos’ producer John Askew at Atlantic Sound Studio and Alex Newport at Future Shock, and back home in the UK. Ben Lovett, the keyboardist in Mumford and Sons, with whom Peggy Sue has toured, helped in the recording of “February Snow.” Steve Ansell from Blood Red Shoes helped record “Watchman” and “She Called.”
“It’s quite interesting because we don't think you can really tell who did which songs unless you are told,” Katy said. The band got much of its inspiration from the apartment they sublet on the Lower East Side while recording in New York in spring 2009.

“We were living amongst all these boxes anti-folk cds and Jeffrey Lewis comics and the walls were covered in posters and everyday we would leave and go to the studios in Brooklyn,” Katy said. “So it was really cool because although we weren't making an anti-folk record it felt like we'd got to this place - recording our album in New York - through our love of Regina Spektor and the Moldy Peaches and Diane Cluck and people like that but that we'd kind of moved on from there as well.”

Peggy Sue developed almost as an after-thought when best friends Katy and Rosa picked up guitars and started playing together while at Sussex University in Brighton, three years ago. The addition of drummer Olly, whom they met at South by Southwest in 2008 added the glue. Last year saw the release of three EPs—Body Parts, First Aid and Lover Gone—all of which have helped launch Peggy Sue as one of the UK’s most exciting new imports. The songs on Fossils and Other Phantoms are sparse, skeletal even—like trees that have lost their leaves for the winter.

There was no specific tragic event or one defining moment that lead to the records’ sparse feeling. Instead, Peggy Sue said it found inspiration from records it has loved—those that “exist as albums as a whole, seemingly in their own world, whose songs and music are thematically linked in an almost cinematic way,” they said, like M. Ward’s Transistor Radio, Neutral Milk Hotel’s classic In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and Bon Iver’s For Emma in addition to more melancholy records, like PJ Harvey’s White Chalk and Elvis Perkins’s Ash Wednesday, which they had listened to more recently.