The Music Lovers

I first fell in love with The Music Lovers in 2003, when I was browsing on Darla.com looking for some new music.  I listened to the two-minute sample of "This World vs. The Next World" and I was instantly hooked:

I bought that first CD EP, Cheap Songs Tell the Truth, immediately, as I have rushed out (figuratively) and bought the two full-length CDs since.  Bandleader Matthew "Teddy" Edwards is a British expatriate, and The Music Lovers make their home in San Francisco.  They have yet to play on this side of the Continental Divide, though I remain hopeful.  I bring them up now because they have another album coming out soon, with a prerelease video directed by Margaret Cho:

Teddy's rich croon, dark lyrics delivered with a sunny melody, and 60s pop sensibilities put The Music Lovers squarely in Scott Walker territory.  ("Classic" Scott Walker, that is, not latter-day "difficult" Scott Walker.)  But there was another connection to be made that I just couldn't put my finger on until, by chance, I listened to the 1986 album The Wrong People by Furniture.  And thereon was a song I had forgotten about for two decades, but it all came flooding back immediately: "Love Your Shoes"--

"We're going to have the best time, the time of our worthless lives!"  How can you not love a lyric like that?  Jim Irwin was Furniture's singer; their first releases were on Survival Records, one of my favorite labels.  Survival was known primarily for minimal synthbeat music, and Furniture's cabaret style was a new direction for them.  However, after one album with Survival (The Lovemongers, with the original "Love Your Shoes"), the band jumped over to Stiff Records, rerecorded "Shoes" for their Stiff album (The Wrong People), and then got lost in the shuffle when Stiff was acquired by ZTT.  Most of that I learned on Wikipedia just now; I have some more Furniture music to track down, I'll report back if I turn up anything good.  In the meantime, if you liked Furniture, you will like The Music Lovers as well, and vice versa.