Big Deal

Lights Out

Review by: Allison Johnson

After listening to Lights Out, it’s likely you’ll either be reminded of how much love bites, or how truly innocent and blissful love can be. Alice Costelloe and Kacey Underwood, the lovelorn Pop duo known as Big Deal released Lights Out back in September 2011 and since then have been gaining some serious Indie street cred. Maybe it’s their undeniable chemistry, their simplistic yet painfully personal approach to music, or perhaps, it’s their sweet, sentimental lyrics that make Big Deal’s music so desirable. Whatever it is, they’ve got it.

Working with only an electric and acoustic guitar, the 13 tracks on the album are filled with a dueling hum and strum like sound. The lack of variation in instruments may seem less appealing, but the minimalistic nature of the musical arrangement on Lights Out only allows more spotlight for the duo’s honest, heartbreaking lyrics, an element which can make or break an album, and definitely makes this one. On “Cool Like Kurt”, Costelloe and Underwood harmonize beautifully over and over again “Take me to your bed/Don’t take me home/I wanna be old/I wanna be older”, a line that displays so accurately the angst that comes along with being a teenager in love. In the more explicit “Talk”, the duo exclaim “It’s okay, I’m just a kid/It’s okay, I’ll get over it.” This harmony and naïve romanticism is a theme which is present throughout the album. Amidst the soft strumming and faint, yet noticeable electric guitar on the track “Swoon”, true poeticism takes shape within the lyric “So come and find me dizzy with the spell of our chemistry/You are a diamond that fits into my heart so perfectly.” And in the case of the more complex “Locked Up”, a song that could very well be one of the heaviest lyrical love songs of 2011, Big Deal so tenderly proclaims “You don’t have to be alone/Maybe you’re not, I wouldn’t know/Cause’ you keep it all locked up.” Along with providing an album to makeup or breakup to, Big Deal truly lives up to their name on Lights Out.