Phil & the Tiles Double Happiness LP
Here’s something that’s been bugging me since this Melbourne act dropped their debut, 2022’s Health/Body EP: what up with this band name? It feels like a pun (along the lines of PHIL ‘N’ THE BLANKS), but not one that makes any sense, and of the six whole-ass people in the band, nobody is named Phil. Then there’s the track “Ode to Phil,” one of this record’s gentler tracks and one seemingly about a superhero named Catgirl. Wut? Thankfully, in doing research for this review, I found that Gimme Gimme Gimme (an excellent zine shedding light on Aussie acts) had gotten to the bottom of this! Turns out Phil was a cat the singer lived with (while rooming with Lewis Hodgson of CIVIC) who often cooled off by laying on the kitchen tiles. Feels good to have that cleared up! So, yeah, this album picks up where they left off on that debut EP. Their core sound is very much in the vein of EDDY CURRENT SUPPRESSION RING or UV RACE—chatty post-punk with some new wave and garage around the edges—but, with six folks in the band, they’ve got too broad of a pool of musical influences to ignore. So, you get stuff like the working class psychedelia of the COSMIC PSYCHOS bleeding in, or tracks where they bump up the aggression and new-wave-iness to LOST SOUNDS-ish results, or even a track where they strip back their typically big sound to a something approaching ESG’s minimal funk punk. Personally, I think they sound best when they play it straight—”The Watcher,” which sounds like a more tuneful version of peak UV RACE, is one of my favorite songs of the year. In any event, whatever they’re playing, they sound like they’re having a blast doing it, making for an immensely listable record.
