Cascadia Calling, 2025.06.30

"she swings her hips and dances to the Wu Tang Clan"

I’m back from London. I spent the morning of my last full day there reading in a sleepy cafe off a pedestrianized street in Maida Vale. The heat rose and I stayed too long. I walked back to my hotel along Regent’s Canal. The canal was dotted with groups of people in boats or lazing in the shade. As I got to Camden, more of them were already drinking. The whole city was languid and wilted. By the time I got back to my hotel my t-shirt was soaked through with sweat and I’d acquired the first sunburn I’ve ever gotten on any of the British Isles.

Allo Darlin’ is the most twee band that I’ll admit to liking. I’m not normally one for soft, jangly pop music and I have a long record of finding love songs dull at best. But something about the earnest open-heartedness of their lyrics and the easy, carefree melodic pop riffs managed to find its way into my good graces pretty early on in their career. I could speculate about the biographical reasons for that (at the time I first heard them I’d just dropped out of school and up-ended my life to move to Seattle so may have been vulnerable) or even the more prosaic psychological ones (I congenitally suffer from intense and persistent wanderlust, so their themes of itinerancy strike a particular weakness in me). Instead, I’ll just note with pleasure that they’re going to be releasing their first album in over a decade.

Releasing “Cologne” as the first single off the record feels like a message. This is thematically and stylistically well in line with their previous records. It sounds fuller, everything turned up a little from the band’s historical baseline, but the familiar rakish themes are still there. The jangly melodies and unfussy structure are still intact. Nothing in this song surprises me, which is always a compliment from a fan.

One of my worst habits is that I sometimes contradict myself before I’ve even made my case. It’s an act of extreme cowardice and anytime you see someone do it, assume they lack all conviction. I’m going to do that now.

I’m not a believer in generation theory or generational afflictions but, I think most people my age got too poisoned by casual irony the same way our parents and grandparents were poisoned by leaded gasoline. We couldn’t help it. It was just in the air we breathed. Irony is antagonistic to earnestness. It’s why I probably feel a small bit of reflexive shame about my love for Allo Darlin’. From the band’s name, to the prominent use of ukelele on their records, to the simple yearning buried in the heart of so many of their songs, it’s all genuine and unironic in a charming way that I feel like I should be immune to.

I’ve said before that the only reason to cover a song is to draw something out of it that no other artist possibly could. I think all the twee elements that I use to shame myself make this an incredible cover. The original Springsteen version is reedy and mournful and sounds like a doomed man reflecting at the end of a too short life. Allo Darlin’s version sounds precociously hopeful. It even rewrites our naive assumptions about the history behind the narrator and their lover, the circumstances, the peril, etc. It recasts the whole song in a new light, one a little more earnest and more resistant to ironic armor.

My love for “Wu Tang Clan” is a lot less complicated. One of the things I appreciate in modern music is world-building. I’m a sucker for a tightly-crafted view into a slice of someone’s life. There’s no real story here or effort at lyrical poetics, just a view onto a woman’s existence and relationship to art. None of us know this woman (we’re all good post-modernists and so swear that this woman has no reality) but we resonate with pieces of the picture the band paints of her.

I also appreciate the latent irony (literary variety; not cultural variety) in a jangly pop song about love for Wu Tang Clan. The interplay between Elizabeth Morris’ lyrics (yearning and verging on maudlin at times) and the loose, loping bass line is especially charming and understated. The pleasant, aimless guitar and laid-back drums are more fit for dancing to than a Wu Tang track. Sonically, it’s not very Wu Tang Clan, which makes it a perfect song about Wu Tang Clan

One of these days I might go too deep into music-about-music like I did recently about political music, but for now I’m content to just enjoy this weird little world that Allo Darlin’ built for us.

N.B: I apologize for the poor audio quality on this track. It’s the only embeddable recording of it I could find, not only on YouTube, but on any other platform. If you want to hear a much better quality version, and possibly buy this or other tracks, check out Allo Darlin’s Bandcamp page.