Darla Records

‘Masculine Feminine’ is the third long-playing record from acclaimed San Francisco-based pop-sophisticates The Music Lovers and the pinnacle of their artistic endeavors. The Music Lovers are led by transplanted Englishman songwriter Matthew Edwards. Edwards refers to ‘Masculine Feminine’ as his own personal ‘Day of the Locust’, a travelogue through the underbelly of the almost-famous doyens of LA and San Francisco. Like a toxic Graham Greene on a tear, Edwards speaks of motels, love-affairs, addictions, vamps and ingénues, pausing on occasion to look back on a half remembered England and wonder what went wrong (or right)? These are desperate songs born of need and frustration, but never dreary, never self-pitying. Rather, they show a formidable spirit of abandon – an abandon to the pop aesthetic; saddling the darkest sensibilities and wickedest proclivities to the sweetest pop-song frame-works. The music? The girl-group sound on a dreary Tuesday morning in 1976… quietly exultant on a radio in Birmingham. Serge and Stax and The Go-Betweens and Dusty and Lerner and Lowe, dammit! If David Goodis had written lyrics for Carole King they might have sounded a little like this record. Yes, they are all ‘love songs’ but not only to people, but places, states of mind and to divine release. ‘Masculine Feminine’ is battered, inebriate, sensual and defiantly and unfashionably romantic! Praise for The Music Lovers: “Gin-spritzed string arrangements and cocktail-bar melancholy, [that comes] off like a Rat Pack version of Lloyd Cole.” – WORD “Hints of '60s AM-radio fodder regularly poke through the creamy, dreamy layers of piano, acoustic guitar, concertina, strings and mellotron, and the results are seductive.” - MAGNET “The Music Lovers sound is lush and voluptuous, making me think of clouds and rain, strings and guitars, both orchestral and earthy, akin to the sublime pleasure of holding your head in my lap, oh my beautiful one.” – comedian MARGARET CHO