I got no patience for anyone

How about a double shot from our New Zealand friends tonight? The Tall Dwarfs song is shrill, rickety, practically twitching out of its own skin. The Chills one is hushed, smooth, like it has a warm duvet thrown over it. Both of them are premised on misanthropy, and who’s not down with that?

In “Wet Blanket,” though, the bile is really just a conceit, a hook on which to hang standard love-song pleas & laments: “I've got nothing to say to anyone, but we can really talk, us two.... You’re so so so beautiful, why aren’t you mine?” And the lonely listeners can still wrap themselves in the keyboard shimmer and the plump bass notes.

There’s not much comfort in “Nothing’s Going to Happen,” but there are thrills, and there’s a righteous, urgent irritation that belies the defeatism of the title. The singer dodges our gaze & spits at a world where children are cooped by the “clumsy dark oafs who train them.” (Those first three words are, of course, over-the-top insulting, but for me it’s the offhandedly disdainful verb “train” that really makes it.)

• Tall Dwarfs, “Nothing’s Going to Happen” (buy the great Hello Cruel World here)
• The Chills, “Wet Blanket” (buy the great Brave Words here)