This song, this whole album, is a trip. And judging from this music video, the live show leans into all the circus / carnival motifs spread across the whole album; and it looks like a freakin' blast, I wish I had known about this guy back in 2019.

It's funny that in the last song I posted I was basically complaining about eclecticism run amok, in the style of music of the mid-2000's, which this album is severely guilty of. But in this case, the hyper-active variety of instrumentation is in support of a general theatricality that is sustained consistently from the first song (Sideshow, which is an excellent song and maybe better than this song I'm posting now) to the last song.

That doesn't mean the album is perfect, no, I think the first half (up to Sometimes) is really strong, while the back half of the album loses me pretty quickly with silly songs and others bordering on ballads. A song like Shadows is just too much of a joke, more suitable to a Weird Al Yankovic album than as a companion to the first half of this album. But, that's okay, I'm not going to fault Nick Lutsko for being too creative, that would be unfair.

This song is so good. It's hitting the same notes as The New Pornographers at their best, with a groovy funky little swivel in it. It's good! Just listen to it.

But I'll warn you, if you like this song and you expect the rest of its album to sound anything like it, you will be sorely disappointed. The album, "Exactly As It Seems", is all over the place. It opens with house music, then turns into some funky disco stuff that simply does not work very well in my opinion, and never really gets over how quirky it thinks it is. I'm all for eclectic bands melding genres together in bursts of joyful experimentation (I did live through the era in which people unironically liked The Fiery Furnaces, a band Home Counties is undoubtedly inspired by), but there's just something about this album that starts to chafe.

But damn, this song is fun! In comparison to the rest of the album, it's low energy and boring, but I guess that's just who I am now, low energy and boring.

Well, this hasn't aged well. Sydney Sweeney went from being America's Sweetheart to pretty disliked by every liberal almost overnight, so I wonder how Smut feels now. Previously this song made for good (and very trite) generalized feminist sound bytes from the band: "We put the sexy woman in the movie so we can see her be sexy and then kill her for it." That may well be true (I don't think it is, really) but I'm not sure that Sydney Sweeney is the feminist icon everyone wanted her to be.

Either way, this song has a great riff. I'm not sure why Uproxx at one point called this a "punk song", because it's just too clean. The whole album is too clean. This stuff sounds like rock music made for tweens 90% of the time and that's just too bad, because it sounds like they have the skills to make something really raw and interesting. Instead they opted to drown their 'punk' sound in studio polish. Bleh. This song is good in a mix of other music, but a whole album of this is just too much to stomach.