"Flaskaboozendancingshoes"

I’ve had the Limousines’ Get Sharp in heavy rotation since picking it up at the show a week ago. I’m digging on the whole album, but one track in particular, “Flaskaboozendancingshoes”, is unstoppable.

I find myself listening to that track more than the others. It’ll finish, and I’ll touch replay before I even realize what I’m doing. So I finally had to sit up and pay attention to the song, listen actively and try to figure out its appeal for me. And I think I finally got to the bottom of it. I don’t know if anyone else would ever join the dots in the same way I did, but the reason I love this song is because there are echoes of the Cure’s “A Few Hour After This...”

In the simplest terms, like that Cure b-side that I hold in the highest regard, “Flaskaboozendancingshoes” is all at once musically sweeping and lyrically playful. Multi-instrumentalist Giovanni Giusti employs lush horns and chiming keyboards giving the song an aural fullness. It’s as if every nook and cranny of the song’s three minutes and 18 seconds is overflowing with a rich beauty that wraps itself around your brain.

Songwriter Eric Victorino’s tongue-in-cheek lyrics counter the music perfectly. The singer allows his imagination to run away from him as he projects where a club hookup might lead years down the road, from moving to the suburbs and giving their future kids “hippie names,” to “shitty sex in separate beds” and restraining orders.

There’s an innocence to the way the story builds and subtly spirals, until our hero realizes what’s happening and overcorrects, eventually finding the perfect balance between the potential of the relationship and the need to be in the moment. Ultimately deciding “I’ll just be me and you be you, two perfect strangers being sneaky with a flask of booze,” he tells her “I’ve got a stack of records, you just bring your dancing shoes.”

“Flaskaboozendancingshoes” is a near-perfect quirky pop song, resonating with my ‘80s nostalgia while bopping along with decidedly new millennial sensibilities.