Pitchfork

Pure happenstance, I came upon an old acquaintance beneath Metropolitan Avenue. After the precursory spinning of mental rolodexes amidst have-you-seen-so-and-so-latelys, she made it known that she is now a part of the lost art of millinery. The yellow fedora of La bohème is her latest creation. "It is a dying trade," she whispered, "because of the quality of buckram. It's the foundation of the industry, and the machines that sew the material make lower thread counts; the very threads themselves are just weaker these days. They just don't make buckram like they used to." From pink pirate hats to tilted trucker caps, they were all done better back in the old days!

So, as I slump at the café, staring moribund at my chinos gone threadbare at the knees, I echo the sentiments of "Summer Clothes" off of Coloma's second release, wanting "to wear the clothes that summer wears," in all its light fabric fits. I swear it will be the hit of the summer, fit for all café dwellers, mostly because there's always something there to remind me of that bygone era still ripe for nostalgic plucking and preening.

For those who pine that The Postal Service were more Anglo, without the pink Death Cab for Cutie baby-tee, enter the stylish Le Corte Ingles of Coloma, two British ex-pats now residing in Köln, Germany. While Alex Paulick neo-romances the programming of Baroque strings and lingering xylophones cut-n-clicked back together again in a tasteful, unassuming early 80s style, Rob Taylor croaks and croons through a buttoned-down throat bothered with both Jarvis Cocker's aesthetic headaches and Bryan Ferry's decadent migraines, his head splitting at the seams with painful observations of the hip and hideous.

His world is full of well-dressed assholes and slumming primadonnas, their visages parading as sensorial barrage: "With their impossible skin and collagen Charles Atlas lips/ Courting the Italian waiter and whistling at the rose-sellers/ When in comes a shower of rickenbacker bricklayer hairgel dumbbell goodfellas." Of course, he's not exactly innocent himself, as there's hair dye on his hands as well when he indicts himself on the epic rendering, "The Tailor": "I don't do sincerity, I couldn't run a mile/ I don't offer guarantees, but I've got a lot of style." As the dignified violin strokes fall apart at the seams, tearing into static, Taylor makes a clean breast of it, admitting, "I am the Dream Weaver, this is the life I chose/ I'm the tailor who sews the Emperor's clothes," revealing his own nakedness in the final wrung breath.

"The Second Closer Still" sutures a sneering lip quiver to Lithops-like hiccups, while the more uptempo "If You Can't Be Good", is Farley Jackmaster Funk with a xylophone on the touchpad throb. "Illegible Love" has all the saxy caress and satiny rustle of Wham's Vaseline-lensed classic, "Careless Whisper". Elsewhere, the tracks are as barbed as any sewing needle threaded with strands of tainted love.

Where Coloma sticks through is in their persistence of vision. The images tumble past quicker than a parade of bulimic models at a Jello-shot slicked staircase, glossy and grotesque as they collapse. There's also that singular feeling Taylor enunciates as "falling like a goose down feather dropped from a tenth story window sill" that makes me swoon. Coloma remains tempered throughout, with every electronic fiber and silken sigh in its right place, proving that a knife lies within every sharp-dressed man.