Lucky Soul make you yearn for a different time, for the not-so-distant past when Saturday mornings were less about chefs and more about pop stars being harassed by puppets. There is a charming softness to the London band's sound that is absent in today's brittle, cool pop world. They belong in the era of fierce chart battles and Melody Maker classifieds.
The gentle electro-bop of Too Much, with its tinkling guitar line and traditional sad girl theme of looking for love in all the wrong places sounds like a missing Kylie song from the X era. The smooth 1960s-soul of (Hurts Like) A Bee Sting is the kind of dream-pop The Cardigans excelled at. On album highlight, the disco stormer No Ti Amo, they morph into the missing link between St Etienne and Sophie Ellis Bextor.
Hard Lines is no masterpiece of modernity but its warm retro stylings still manage to seduce.
