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'The Soft and the Hardcore' (K Records) Tender Forever is the nom de plum of singer-songwriter (imagine the term hasn't been irreparably soiled by the turgid banality of James Blunt) Melanie Valera, from Bordeaux. She has recently released her first LP through K Records (primarily famed for its 'K Shield' logo being tattooed on Kurt Cobain's wrist [Kurt Cobain putting needles in his arm... who would have thought?]). Tender Forever mixes maddeningly catchy pop melody with reductionist D.I.Y. modus operandi in the grand tradition of Post-punk/ American Underground/ C86. However, Tender Forever does not embody the clichés of these movements: intense, young philosophy-graduate indie fan-boys in anoraks struggling manfully with guitars they can't play and tunes no-one can remember; Melanie's embracement of electronic music belongs to contemporary pop music (see DFA Records, Annie, M.I.A., etc.); rather than making retrogressive paeans to the forgotten but strangely remembered '80s, she crafts something that is aesthetically clean, fauvist and as completely of its time as The Ramones or Television were of the mid-seventies, or as Slint and Shellac were of the early-nineties. Throughout 'The Soft and the Hardcore' (all twenty-six minutes of it), the paper-thin digital bleeps and tweaks that serve as accompaniment to Melanie's voice offer a disarming frankness; on 'The Feeling of Love' it all combines to magnify the warmth of her charming, launguid singing, while on 'Marry Me' it betrays a wan resignation: it as though her pin-sharp vocal chisels a hole in the icy veneer of sheen and schmaltz, and reveals beneath an innocently serious sentiment, but never unnecessary sentimentality. In an epoch in which the music press are so starved for something authentic that they adopt a group of teenagers spouting platitudes in thick Sheffield accents and represent them as the greatest source of profound aphorisms since Schopenhauer, Tender Forever is glaringly vital.
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