Darla Records

The debut LP from this NYC band features cult songwriter Michael Grace, Jr., vocalist Lisa Ronson (daughter of glam legend Mick Ronson,) and the lads that made his previous project (the adored, but obscured My Favorite) an important band to indie pop kids in the know. It is a group of songs they began during the last days of that band, a much rumored “B-Movie Monster” album featuring zombie hipsters, suicidal vampires, flickering phantoms, and the occasional Sicilian saint. Grace, Jr. explains…

“I began to see so many of my friends and other people of my generation as haunted creatures. The Smiths, drugs, the end of the century...something had cast a long shadow over us. We began this record wanting to make heroes out of them, but ended up with only monsters.”

The previous album the boys in this band made, My Favorite’s “The Happiest Days of Our Lives” was just named “BEST OF DECADE” in Pitchfork Media by The Pains of Being Pure at Heart’s Kip Berman, and has made fans of people like Stuart Murdoch, The Magnetic Fields, and according to rumor, Morrissey.

All their musical pasts have been remade/remodeled into a new kind of cinematic post-pop which has drawn comparisons to The Patti Smith Group, Roxy Music, The Smiths and Felt.
Beneath the rainy jangles of C86, the buzz & stomp of glam, and the light & air of Spector’s girl groups, there is a lyrical and emotional depth out of synch with our scene, but not of our lives. Berman said My Favorite may have been “too pure to succeed,” but it’s our opinion that The Secret History may just be too pure not to.

1. Johnny Anorak
2. Our Lady of Stalingrad
3. God Save the Runaways
4. Love Theme (from The World That Never Was)
5. Death Mods
6. Our Lady of Palermo
7. My Life With The Living Dead
8. Sex With Ghosts
9. Johnny Nightmare
10. Sister Rose
11. Count Backwards (Rock ‘N’ Roll Never Dies)
12. How I Saved My Life