Written by: Dave Cantrell

This music-writing business, I tell ya, is all about catching up (or it is for me, anyway), and I mean that in at least a couple ways. One is the more immediate fact that, due my proclivities toward an arguably too-wide array of all things creative that are liable to pique my interest this way and that – movies, books, writing a bit of fiction here and there, making yet-attended to covers for one of the 100+ cassette mixtapes that date back to the 80s and stretch into the aughts, that sort of thing – it’s a little surprising I don’t suffer some sort of ‘curiosity whiplash.’ Thus, related to that, I find myself too frequently having to, yes, catch up to releases that dropped a full month (or more) previous to pen hitting paper as is the regrettable case with OKC-based band doubleVee’s July 25th-released latest, the fetchingly-titled Periscope at Midnight.

Consisting of the dynamic husband and wife duo Allan Vest and Barb (nee Hendrickson) Vest, the pair have been issuing dispatches from the more darkly whimsical/inventive corners of the pop spectrum since 2017’s spry debut The Moonlit Fables of Jack the Ripper that not only received its fair share of kudos and hossanas but as well marked doubleVee out as a fairly fearless proposition due to the fact that, really, how many bands/artists begin their ride into the hearts and charts of potential listeners with a concept album of all things? The answer, as you know, fits firmly under the phrase ‘vanishingly few’ and hence do you have a clue to the bracing level of ambition they bring to every release not least on this latest, a six-song EP that lands with an LP-sized impact. Id est…

The stately punch of opener “Submarine Number Three Vee,” clever, driven, swimming in a choppy, adroit sea of classic pop tropes (Broadway-worthy synth strings draped among sharply-shaped electric guitar chords with a few “woo-woo“s popping up as needed), its whimsy and drama drawn in equal measure and thereby serving as an ideal entry point to both band and record. Then there’s EP highlight (maybe? It’s got some tough competition) “Diamond Thumb,” a perfectly poised and pulsing three-minute pop gem that’s so damn danceable it should, if this were a proper world, appear on every dancefloor DJ’s playlist from here to eternity. The enigmatically bespoke “Maybe Tonight [What’s Inside of Me?]” sure-handedly jumps into your ears with a jukebox intensity like some uncanniluy-designed hybrid of Cheap Trick and Buzzcocks, its level of seemingly effortless pop classicism carrying that same inveterate vibe and then there’s “Natural Selection” that presents as if John Barry had emerged during the late 80s/early 90s Indie Wars, blending as it does its touch of tropicalia with the great lost laissez-faire naturalism of the La’s.

So OK, as is our wont, we’ve left a couple tracks undiscussed (“Modern Times” and “Everyone’s Lonely Under the Sea”) simply for the sake of your own self-discovery (and believe us, they’re worthy) but know that everywhere here on Periscope at Midnight you’ll find an unforced confidence wherein the eye-winkingly inventive is boosted by the duo’s innate pop instincts. Will it change the world? No, but in a just universe it would at least set it dancing enough to take its collective mind off tyrants and their tantrums and as such arrives as a (very) welcome, intelligently crafted diversion from the unrealness of the ‘real’ world which in itself is an irony of the most welcome kind seeing as the pair’s embrace, both image- and music-wise, of the delightfully (and most welcome) unworldly.