Pitchfork

ABBA now have their own Pipettes. OK, that's unfairly reductive, but recent developments have been pointing toward a group like new Secretly Canadian signees Music Go Music for several years now: Mamma Mia!, Madonna's "Hung Up", the growing interest in Swedish pop, the increasingly lavish sweetness of some of that pop, an excellent Poptimist column by Pitchfork's Tom Ewing... All this yin to the 1990s underground's noisy, cred-focused yang comes to its logical, "Dancing Queen"-sized conclusion in Los Angeles-based Music Go Music's "Light of Love": all vast plate reverb, carefree whoa-oh-ohs, Broadway-ready lead vocals, grandiose orchestral synths, and T. Rex boogie. And some people seemed to think Belle & Sebastian went too far with Dear Catastrophe Waitress.

"Light of Love" rejoices in its twin subjects, love and glitzy pop, moving from melancholy, keyboard-driven verses to jaunty, guitar-bolstered choruses reminiscent of, like, Billy Joel's "Only the Good Die Young", by way of emphatic drum fills. Music Go Music hold back the best part for after the chorus: "Speak to me darling in hushed tones/ Tell me your true heart's desire," they sing, in relatively hushed tones, then add, "Now we are in this together." Yeah, but they're the ones who will have to follow this maximalist, if backward-looking, single; it's the first in a planned series of vinyl releases for the group. Umm, go music.

MP3:> Music Go Music: "Light Of Love"
[from the "Light of Love" 12"; out now on Secretly Canadian]