In their signature track, ‘Matilda’, indie four-piece Dance à la Plage airily throw a profound socio-sexual truth out there: men’s clothes inevitably look better on women. I’m a bit of a collar-and-tie chap myself, but Joe Hamilton dresses his heroine in long johns and knitted socks. It’s a clever line, conjuring a girl who is unpretentious, amiable, casually sexy. The music suits her too, being a touch on the jazzy side, a trifle Maroon Five in places, chart-friendly but not joylessly homogenous. Hamilton’s singing is tuneful and youthful, with a slight piping quality, as if he has just escaped from Westminster Abbey Choir (don’t worry, Oxon Police, they’re from Banbury!) and the band’s playing as a whole has a breezy lightness of touch which keeps the whole song bouncing along tiggerishly. At the end they even throw in a monstrous steal from the Killers’ ‘All these things that I’ve done’, but by then they have also stolen our hearts, so we forgive them.
‘Pink Love’ is the other standout track from this EP, another irresistibly pretty swinging guitar pick kicking things off and featuring one of those choruses that are closer to refrains, a single line repeated several times but with different nuances each time you hear it. It’s not fruitful to speculate what the pink object is that Joe is in love with (he mentions several rolls in verse 1: can it be a new vehicle for hard drugs, or a new fragrance of Andrex?), so it’s best to just go with the flow and enjoy the melodies.
Despite a professed love of Foals, it’s hard to see much crosstalk between DALP’s lightweight but loveable vignettes and the more complex pleasures of Oxford’s finest ex-math-rockers, but the city is surely big enough for them both. But lads, please be careful about the company you keep: last time I checked, you were supporting Frankie Coccozza.