Dansette Dansette

iTunes Review

Tender Trap’s Amelia Fletcher is a true pioneer in the indie-pop scene, and while raising kids and working as an economist in Britain, she’s managed to hold her latest band, Tender Trap, together since 2002. Dansette Dansette, the band’s third full-length, features a new guitarist and drummer, and is filled with glorious, perfectly formed, girl-group pop tuneage. Flavored with Phil Spector vocal stylings and walls of reverbed guitars and, of course, the British twee-pop sound she helped define (à la Tallulah Gosh, Heavenly), Fletcher has a ball with the lyrics: she rhymes “psychologically” with “gynecologically” in the boyfriend-searching tale of woe, “Do You Want a Boyfriend,” and on the cow-punky “Girls With Guns,” chirps a warning to local playah, “You will be found out and we are gonna get your bad ass now!” Vivian Girls and Dum Dum Girls owe a debt to Amelia Fletcher ... we’re lucky she’s still paving the path for indie grrls everywhere. (A Dansette, by the way, is a brand of portable, mono record player that was popular in the 1950s and ‘60s; the first step to your iPod.)