It’s hard, these days, to move through the world feeling optimistic. Violence is everywhere. Prices are steep, jobs are scarce, AI fakery is ubiquitous, and everything seems to be in a state of collapse. It would be natural for me to turn to any of the harsh or melancholy-tinged AD 93 records stored in my iPod. But I’ve more often found myself hitting play on The Velvet Underground and Rowan, a brilliant and irreverent underground pop album released last summer that’s edgy but not irony-poisoned, silly but not unserious, darkly funny and giddily joyful. Its 14 songs, totaling just over 30 minutes, brought the skip back to my step and the song back to my heart like little else in recent memory.
The Velvet Underground and Rowan is the work of Londoners Leo Fincham, a visual artist and producer who records as Worldpeace DMT, and Rowan Please, government name Rowan Miles, a member of the Teenagers-esque pop duo the Femcels. Fincham and Miles are part of the ’00s-fetishizing London scene that tangentially includes fakemink and Bassvictim, but The Velvet Underground and Rowan makes the pair feel like a scene of two: They may give entertaining and slightly crazy interviews, maintain messy Instagram pages, and put on hyped shows with little advance notice—and Fincham may live, or have lived, with Bassvictim’s Ike Clateman—but their music is a melange of hyper-uncool early-’10s indie references and pathos-heavy lyrics, delivered with Donny & Marie Osmond-level chumminess.
The first time I listened to The Velvet Underground and Rowan, I felt like I’d just been king hit by Carles: Fincham and Miles may talk up their love of the ’60s in interviews, and shades of both the Beach Boys and their album’s namesake may crop up at times—along with a chirpy cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “The Ledge”—but, for the most part, The Velvet Underground and Rowan feels like the work of two people who came of age in the late ’00s and early ’10s. Fincham and Miles draw liberally from the primary-colored soup of post-landfill-indie bands like Darwin Deez, Grouplove, and Cults, cheerfully yelping choruses and layering them with chimes, programmed drums, and finicky guitar riffs. There are less outré reference points, too—Sung Tongs-era Anco, the sunny plunderphonics of the Avalanches—but never anything that would warrant a second glance from anyone in the bar queue at Ormside or OTO.
In this sense, The Velvet Underground and Rowan feels of a piece with Callahan & Witscher’s Think Differently, pairing two underground musicians who put a cheeky, throw-everything-at-the-wall spin on relatively unfasionable sounds. But where Callahan & Witscher use their ’90s rock pastiche in service of blackpilled anti-Boomkat nihilism, Fincham and Miles seem like optimists. Their music is certainly funny, but their lyrics often scan as totally earnest, even when they’re droll. “Wrote this song just so you’d know/To love yourself no matter what,” yelps Miles on the sweet, glitchy “Love Yourself,” before, a few verses later: “Leo wrote this song for you/Sorry that I fucked your dude.”
