ther than that whole unpleasantness with Al Qaeda, the defining trait of the 21st century has been its insistence on forcing its porn stars into mock 1920s clothing and poses. All you used to need for a Class-A grot movie was a couple of single Albanian immigrant mothers and a speculum. Nowadays it’s all about badly inked anorexic skanks doing bargain basement Gypsy Rose Lee impressions whilst grinding awkwardly to, I dunno, Stereolab or something. Fuck that noise. Club promoters need to start blaring The Ditty Bops over those speakers pronto. This lot are so damn good, you won't even notice the track marks on the strippers' arms.

The Ditty Bops are two sapphically-inclined Los Angelinos who make the kind of music that should have been playing in the background when debate got overheated at the Algonquin Round Table. Dorothy Parker steps to Ruth Hale wielding a broken beer bottle? Moon Over The Freeway would have been a perfect soundtrack. The DBs come equipped with a mandolin, a dulcimer, no ability to break your heart, and plenty of ability to get you doing those flapper dances that haven't been hot since Doop were running things.

Their songs are short, breezy, and crack your skull open with the kind of natural frivolity you'd expect from the Prohibition era. They can attack you with bluegrass, country swing, jazz, ragtime (insert lame Ghost World reference here), and some good old-fashioned burlesque music hall. “Angel With An Attitude” isn't just a nice introduction to the girls as people, it shows you what they're like as talent as well. Starting with some Parisian stroll music, all of a sudden someone pops the champagne cork and we're throwing out severe jitterbug moves like “Raging” Abe Simpson in his prime.

They can even do meta: and the 20s style cover of 50s standard “Bye Bye Love” in the 00s proves it. Whereas the rest of the album excels in bombast and over-eggedness (tracks like “Fall Awake” are a little too close to blue room chill-out to stick), when they tackle Don and Phil Everly they show off their other strength: breezy cotton candy harmonies. It's all so effortless for these two.

The catwalk bluegrass “It's A Shame” could have gone down a storm on the Jenny Lewis album, whereas elsewhere the instrumentation suggests (bizarrely) a less cynical, more shaved Adam Green. It's a tribute to The Ditty Bops that they haven't hoisted their colors to any indie yuppie freak folk scene, and instead are rolling strictly dolo (they're currently in the midst of a LA to NY tour travelling solely on their bikes). They close the show with “Your Head's Too Big,” a Mediterranean wedding dance crossed with burlesque stand-up comedy. A man's inflated cranium is popped, balloon-stylee, with a pin. Canned laughter plays, and then you wonder why canned laughter doesn't turn up on more songs. Ditty Bops? They just do things differently.

Listen to songs from Moon Over the Freeway here.