New EP Alert : The She-Devils

The '60s offered quite a few campy beach movies with ginchy musical numbers featuring kids dancing along in wild appreciation. One of my favorites of this genre stars Nancy Sinatra who also performs a song in the 1966 classic The Ghost Of the Invisible Bikini. It's packs a one two punch of comedy-kiddie horror meets an excuse to parade good looking college kinds in bathing suits who writhe with pleasure to those crazy sounds of surf guitars. Yummy!

(Nancy performs at the 13:50 mark but here is the whole film for your viewing pleasure)

The She-Devils are a boy/girl Montreal duo that electronically reproduces these retro beachy tunes to perfection. They have even mastered the snap, crackle, and pop of an old record to make their brand of dreamy pop all the more vintage. I highly recommend checking out their new EP which is out now. The lead single "Come" is posted below.

A group like Noonday Underground have come before them to blend mod, soul, and bubblegum to sophisticated UK breakbeats but this is the first time I have heard someone come this close to recreating Nancy Sinatra's dead pan sex kitten voice. If you loved Mad Men for their thoughtful recreation of another time, The She-Devils will be the olive in your martini.

Nancy Sinatra

Nancy Sinatra was among the first women I began obsessively collecting records by. I have always been drawn to the complex layers at work behind her image during the '60s and '70s. She was a strong woman yet was also daddy's good little girl (Frank Sinatra to be exact). She was a sex kitten with claws. She believed that a feminist could still be sexy and that the two were not mutually exclusive from each other. Here is a great read on "Female Empowerment, Nancy's Way" . This push and pull of sexy and strong appears time and time again in music (from Kathleen Hanna to Beyoncé) so while there were plenty of bad ass ladies that came before Nancy in music, it really all started with her for me. 

 

I dig Nancy so much that I took my DJ and social media name from this hit Lee Hazlewood wrote for her.