Over the transom

Even a small-timer like me gets all kinds of unsolicited e-mails urging mp3s upon me, more than I can keep up with. Most of what gets sent ain’t my cuppa tea, but lately a few things that have crossed my desktop have also caught my ear.

• Murder Mystery, “Love Astronaut”
• Murder Mystery, “What My Baby Said”

The album is Are You Ready for the Heartache Cause Here It Comes and you can buy it here. The band is from NYC (info here), but to me this sounds like pure Midwestern power pop, openhearted & guileless.

Clarification: guileless in that they’re having fun and they’re just hoping you will too. But guileless doesn’t mean they’re not savvy. Boy, are they savvy. They know when to accentuate the drumbeat and add tambourine shakes, when to swivel the spotlight over to the bassline, when to bring in the female backing vocals and when to keep them down to one word per line. Mostly it’s about canny use of negative space.

Reminds me of a really good action movie (a rare rare bird, I know). You watch it and you see that they’re following certain conventions and you spot the tricks they’re using on you, but that doesn’t make the tricks any less pleasurable, just more so.

Oh, and at its best the record’s stratagems are supported by solid hooks. Don’t take my word for it.

• Cagey House, “Alarm Decisions”
• Cagey House, “Mrs. Otisphere”

Don’t know much about this outfit, but there’s some info here. These are from an album of short instrumental electronic pieces called Model City, and that sounds about right. Except for the occasional bass pulse or groan of reverb, there are no dark corners here: everything is disorientingly bright. As billed, it has kind of a noir feel, but it’s noir for the future, one of those visions of the future where the hallways are all pure white and everyone wears identical jumpsuits.

That sounds like I’m down on this, but I’m not at all. There’s a lot going on there musically, and I find it really compelling.

• The Superfantastics, “Tonight Tonite”

This one especially has been on repeat in my heart lately. The Superfantastics are from Halifax and I’m curious to hear the album – which, I know, I know, has been out for months, just like this song.

The band name & song title suggest sugar rush, and sure, the elements of twee guitar pop are in place, but here they’re played understated. Everything chugs along in lockstep, softly crackling, tugging the diffident vocals along, and it sounds great, melancholy but not a downer.

And then there’s that great fakeout with the “happiest time of the year” line, which rises up all uplifting & makes me think of nothing so much as a McCartney or Lennon Xmas song. But then things drop again – “I don’t see anyone smiling” – and keep chugging along.

Oh, and props to the the guitar solo, too. I’ve always liked that particular sound, and that minimalist style.

I got no patience for anyone

How about a double shot from our New Zealand friends tonight? The Tall Dwarfs song is shrill, rickety, practically twitching out of its own skin. The Chills one is hushed, smooth, like it has a warm duvet thrown over it. Both of them are premised on misanthropy, and who’s not down with that?

In “Wet Blanket,” though, the bile is really just a conceit, a hook on which to hang standard love-song pleas & laments: “I've got nothing to say to anyone, but we can really talk, us two.... You’re so so so beautiful, why aren’t you mine?” And the lonely listeners can still wrap themselves in the keyboard shimmer and the plump bass notes.

There’s not much comfort in “Nothing’s Going to Happen,” but there are thrills, and there’s a righteous, urgent irritation that belies the defeatism of the title. The singer dodges our gaze & spits at a world where children are cooped by the “clumsy dark oafs who train them.” (Those first three words are, of course, over-the-top insulting, but for me it’s the offhandedly disdainful verb “train” that really makes it.)

• Tall Dwarfs, “Nothing’s Going to Happen” (buy the great Hello Cruel World here)
• The Chills, “Wet Blanket” (buy the great Brave Words here)

You say you want a revolution

From American Studies by Mark Merlis:

After the end of history, the workers would go to concert halls and listen to American tone poems with titles like The Corn-Husking. They would go home to nutritious meals – things made in a pressure cooker, to preserve the natural colors and save the vitamins. After dinner they would retire to living rooms furnished in blond wood, like Tom’s last ghastly apartment. There they might read a newspaper devoid of rape or gossip or publicity stunts. Or they might, if it was summer and still light, go out to the common space and play with the children – play some nonviolent, cooperative game like volleyball. At last they would go to bed and have intercourse with their odorless wives. Healthy and simple intercourse: as their lives were without frustrations, there would be nothing to be worked out, worked off, in bed. Nor in their dreams; what dreams would they need?