Love Is All "Two Thousand And Ten Injuries" LP (2010)

Two Thousand and Ten Injuries buzzes with joy. Hardly surprising, since Love Is All are one of the era's great punk bands. But wait: Should you really use the word "punk" to describe a band with such obvious ambitions beyond the guitar/bass/drums baseline? Because if you've heard Love Is All, you know they're hardly formalists: disco beats, post-punk sax honking, twee-pop boy-girl harmonies. They've got a definite sound, but within its boundaries they're thrillingly unconstrained.

Listen past the kitchen-sink sonic clutter, though, and Two Thousand and Ten Injuries could have wooed the same teen rabble as Sam the Sham and the Trashmen. After all, the garage and psych bands of the Nuggets-era also played ham-handed organs and saxes, and pounded their way through ethnic percussion and a hundred variations on the Bo Diddley beat. And nobody would describe them as post-punk. Take TTaTI opener "Bigger Bolder", with its learn-in-a-minute melody and reverb-ragged "bad" production. It's the kind of fuzzy, bouncy racket you could imagine blaring from jukeboxes in the early 1960s.

But then there are the lyrics. It's the lyrics that separate Love Is All from those garage rock pioneers and really connect them to the late-70s DIY explosion. Love Is All singer Josephine Olausson is one of the early 21st century's great poets of romantic dissatisfaction, and like the ladies of the Slits, the Raincoats, and the Delta 5, her take on bad romance is deeply personal, beyond post-punk pastiche. Her kiddie yelp, with its innate cuddliness when she goes soft and conversational, can sound like a precocious grade-schooler obsessed with her mom's copy of Wanna Buy a Bridge?. But the sugary cuteness is a smokescreen, hiding the kind of scalpel-edged self-examination most of us like to avoid at all costs.