LA Weekly (2011)
Music Picks

The Love Me Nots @ The Saint

"It could happen tomorrow," Nicole Laurenne warns between Michael Johnny Walker's window slams of guitar. "There will never be a guarantee that the end will come an easy way." Her urgency is convincing, and not just because the stylishly mod Phoenix singer recently survived cancer. The Love Me Nots attack 60's garage tropes with a hard rock drive on their latest album, The Demon and The Devotee, with Laurenne's circus-y Farfisa organ spinning circles around Walker's buzzing swarm of bees. The up-tempo collection lets up momentarily for "She's Nothing Like Me," whose spare, deceptively sweet verses camouflage the euphoric rush of the chorus and Laurenne's serene, above-it-all vocals. Later her funereal keyboards and shadowy singing, under a blaze of bleary Morriscone trumpet, transform "Trouble" into an exotically modern answer to "House of the Rising Sun." - Falling James