Peer Validated

Pictured:  Best Friends Forever, rocking full-time, lifeguarding part-time.

Best Friends Forever are an art-pop-rock trio from Minneapolis.  They play really catchy songs with bells and guitar and shaky-sometimes-talk-sometimes-sing-vocals.  They have real hooks, and play real live shows.  It says so on their myspace. 

Besides that, I don’t know much about either lead singer (Bri Smith and Jes Seamans).  I guess they’re best friends, which completely makes sense not only with the name (obviously enough), but also in the way that this sounds like a band  a couple of friends would make on a weekend with nothing better to do.  This isn’t a bad thing, BFF’s songs rollick and flow with the ease of a science project explaining cloud formation.  Sure, on paper you know why clouds are formed, but it’s the process and the presentation that makes it novel and dare I say, artistically credible? 

The standout single, “Handpocket” focuses on the girls’ brushes with death, or as they so aptly put it, “Mortal danger”.  It features a plankity guitar driving a song while the girls chirp, “you’re singing makes me want to do it.  (thank you!)”, or “When I’m panicked, I can’t skate!”, and “I almost died, it was so embarassing, but I’m alive so you can fall in love with me.”  The choruses start out with the catchiest stutter this side of “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet”.  I have the feeling that anything else I say will just sort of ruin an amazing song, so go find a friend (best or otherwise), get out the macaroni necklaces and go nuts.