Ex Cops
Daggers
DOWNTOWN
5/10
Amalie Bruun and Brian Harding are Ex Cops, and they miss the ’90s. While their debut, True Hallucinations, was a warm ode to Slowdive, sophomore record Daggers aims for the same decade, but with a broader penchant for pastiche. So it makes sense they’ve enlisted the help of Ariel Pink, who seems preternaturally imprisoned behind VHS tracking fuzz, and the production acumen of Billy Corgan, who looks like he’s still digesting a burrito he ate twenty years ago. With these guys’ help: here are sharper stabs at melody, clarity; here is an album in the pocket of Mariah Carey’s tight jeans circa “Dreamlover”; here is the unabashed lyric “How could you be so shitty / To a girl so pretty?” The duo would prefer their insanely catchy electro-pop existed in a time when kids still recorded mixtapes off the radio and those lyrics were acceptable—but they don’t. And they aren’t.
