Advantage Lucy

It would be disingenuous to describe Japan's advantage Lucy without deploying the convenient descriptors so often applied to lighter indie pop fare: bubbly, gummy, jangly, Swedish. Worse would be to overlook obvious points of reference. Lucy's members frequently name-drop the Smiths, the Cardigans, Ivy; their sound evokes Rocketship, the Concretes, Camera Obscura; their spirit if not their aesthetic recalls that of the folks at Sarah and K Records. But one of the most inexplicable things about pop music is how little of it actually sounds the same. For a genre highly formulaic...