The British musical duo, comprising the versatile musician Will Turner and the co-singer and -songwriter Georgie Fuller (who expand to a five-piece for live performances), the Heavy Heavy, secured a record deal with ATO and appearances on American television programmes such as Jimmy Kimmel Live! and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on the strength of their debut extended play record, Life and Life Only. Those who were quick to embrace the group will be pleased to discover that the buoyant presence and nostalgic charm that initially garnered the Heavy Heavy attention are even more pronounced on their full-length debut, One of a Kind. The project draws on an ever-expanding pool of familiar sounds from the mid- to late 1960s, filtering them through a hooky, harmonic mid-fi lens. The musical touchstones in play range from the raw, strutting rock of the early British Invasion to the hazier psychedelic pop/rock and adjacent folk-rock of acts such as the Byrds and the Mamas & the Papas, with a hint of the gritty Creedence Clearwater Revival twang evident in their sound. Irrespective of the musical references that may be made, the album commences in an enthusiastic manner, with the use of chafed vocal harmonies, a rumbling blues undergirding, carefree guitar solos and howling harmonica. The second track, "Happiness," maintains the enthusiasm established in the preceding songs. It was an early single whose sunny, bittersweet quality reached the top of the Triple-A radio charts prior to the album's release. The album's generous 12-song track list largely maintains a similar style, with occasional deviations into more anxious psychedelic pop on "Feel," pastoral, keyboard-infused pop on "Wild Emotion," Woodstock-ian blues-rock on the Fuller-led "Dirt," and trippy, meandering atmospherics on the especially Mamas & the Papas-approached "Salina." While the Heavy Heavy do occasionally borrow riffs from other sources, the songs on this album evoke a sense of being lost in time. However, the quality of the songwriting is such that the songs stand on their own merits, rather than being merely forgotten outtakes.
