And on the extra-catchy single 'Once and Never Again', she knows how it feels to be 19 - and she'd 'love to feel a girl age.'Īs Pulp's Jarvis Cocker quipped on his band's breakthrough album, His 'n' Hers: 'Imagine it's a film and you're the star./ You might get your happy ending/ Your ending, the thing you deserve.' Most so-called 'cinematic' records earn that distinction due to some quirk of reverb or their use of space, but the Long Blondes only have modern England's typically confined, 17-year-old-from-Doncaster guitar-dudish sound. On upbeat twentysomething tragedy 'Swallow Tattoo', she's distressed by the significance of a common prison tattoo, but still wants to.

Jackson's got desire down, as well: 'There are wants and there are needs/ And they're two very different things/ You can love or be in love,' she sets forth in 'Weekend Without Makeup'. She talks a lot in the imperative ('Don't turn around, don't walk away,' or 'Don't go to London'), and, on 'Heaven Help the New Girl', she updates the classic trembly girl-group ballad better than anybody (apart from Camera Obscura's Tracyanne Campbell), with an arrangement equally suitable for Morrissey or Colin Meloy. And she does know fear, of a sort: She's often measuring herself against idealized competition, as on 'In the Company of Women' ('What's she got that I might not?'), or waiting out the other girl rather than risk loneliness (on 'Only Lovers Left Alive').

'I know all about fear and desire,' Jackson asserts on brazen opener 'Lust in the Movies', sounding like she lives on lipgloss, cigarettes, and glasses of wine. It makes you wonder why anyone actually likes the Kooks. But what the album really tells us most about is the divide between the girls on film and our little iWorld- the contrasts between romantic notions and dreary humdrum, wants and needs, love and being in love, and inertia and bone-jumping. So they're the pop-punk Dusty Springfield to fellow Sheffield band the Arctic Monkeys' provincial kids-today Kinks. Produced by Pulp's Steve Mackey (singles re-recorded, sadly), the Long Blondes inherit that band's arched back and sharp tongue, plus a bit of Elastica's love of borrowed late-70s riffs.

Sheffield's the Long Blondes say: You could have both!!! Baxter: All they want is 'a good film noir and a bottle of gin.' If those starlets of the silver screen can be blamed for our culture's impossible standards regarding the opposite sex, clearly it's all that hardcore, girl-next-door interporn that offers enough 'reality' for guys to hold down jobs, tie our shoes, and buy Valentine's Day presents. A quintet of two guys and three dolls, the Long Blondes seem obsessed with cinema- Sedgwick, Anna Karina, Arlene Dahl, From Here to Eternity, and C.C.

Someone to drive you home rar