In a Sea of Broken Synthesizers

Coltrane Motion’s Songs About Music might be my fave record of the year so far. The lyric fragment above – from “Twenty-Seven,” the second song – goes a long way toward catching the appeal: they churn up a messy onrush of cracked keyboard sounds and simple, insistent rhythms, overlaid onto melodic pop and doot-doot vocals. Reminds me of the thrill of the very early Pavement records, the eureka of hearing those guys cover doo-wop syllables with Fall spasms.

The song titles are arch & jokey – “I Guess the Kids Are OK,” “Ex-Girlfriend in a Coma,” “Dozier-Holland-Dozier” – but the album title, it turns out, is straightup earnest: these songs are indeed about music, and this rock is metarock. Not that there’s any Grand Statement or anything here, and whew for that. Instead it’s just Let’s Put on a Show, mooning away, and hey, we’ve got ’60s pop stars, we’ve got the same chords, the same notes, we’ve got kick drums, snare drums, kick drums, snare drums.

The two songs below are probably my faves, the first for its ominous bassline steam (but a kind of ecstatically, theatrically ominous) and the second for its shamelessly ingratiating chirp (and, of course, for the “Be My Baby” drumbeat quote, which I guarantee I will fall for every single time some band uses it, ever).

Where they go from here I dunno; I suppose you might wonder if their giddy skewed-pop model is sustainable. But I suspect it is if they keep messing with the sounds. They overplay their hand with the “Louie Louie” / “Wild Thing” rip on the album closer “Summertime,” but the song still has some shrilly striking organ lines; it sounds like the keyboard’s painfully morphing into a flute.

Raw info: Coltrane Motion is just a twosome, Michael Bond and Matt Dennewitz, apparently pulling their tracks together out of a homemade-tape backlog. Located in Chicago by way of Ohio, I think, and self-releasing their stuff on their own Data Was Lost label. Some say their live show is what really kicks, so hopefully sometime I’ll be able to see for myself.

Buy the record here.

• Coltrane Motion, “Twenty-Seven”

• Coltrane Motion, “How to Be”