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The Blow (NYTimes.com Review)

THE BLOW "Paper Television" (K)
by JON PARELES

Love is for patsies, and sooner or later anyone who succumbs to it winds up being used. That's the matter-of-fact attitude behind the songs on the Blow's first full-length album, "Paper Television." The Blow is two women from Portland, Ore.: Khaela Maricich and Jona Bechtolt. They're fond of the two-dimensional synthesizer tones, cheap drum machines and sparse arrangements of early-1980's electropop but they don't rule anything out, from guitar to glockenspiel. And Ms. Maricich lends her voice, full of girlish mock-innocence, to sweetly hardnosed lyrics and poppy melodies. The album is less raw and more subversively tuneful than the Blow's 2004 EP "Poor Aim, Love Songs."

"Piles of Gold" starts the album with 21st-century electronic stutters and chopped-off notes. "All the girls are sitting on a pile of gold," Ms. Maricich chants with a giggle in her voice "And the boys, you know they want it," adding, "It's economic." In "The Long List of Girls," the track meshes at least three snare drums, buzzy synthesizer lines and contrapuntal backup vocals as Ms. Maricich heads into yet another hapless liaison. And "Babay" distills a minimal version of a Phil Spector beat while Ms. Maricich sings, "The truth is I was just too dumb/to stop myself from holding on/I believed in love." She sounds wiser now, and not sadder but sassier.

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