The (Finally) Popnarcotic Top 20 Of 2009 (Cont.)
I’ll come clean here: Ghost, She Said, the third DWG album was the first record of theirs I’d ever heard, and I was sort of amazed to discover that fact and then also discover that I’d sort of wandered into a film in the middle act. Deleted Waveform Gatherings is the music brainchild of a Norwegian rock and pop maestro named Øyvind Holm. Holm’ band used to be called The Dipsomaniacs and they recorded a few albums…but wouldn’t you know, there was a Jersey band going by that same name. Holm picked a new name (chosen, seemingly, to ensure that it was an original) and here we are, third album from Deleted Waveform Gatherings.
Let me try to take you through what listening to this record was like for me the first time out. The album opens with an almost desperate acoustic-fueled song called “Doorway” that drops an amazing middle 8 out of nowhere to take a decent song and make it a very good one…but on the heels of that fine tune we get “Shaman’s Tambourine”, an Allman/Black Oak Arkansas-esque stab at arena boogie that just seems out of place and which quickly made me a lot less interested in Ghost, She Said.
And then along comes the stunner. There’s nothing in Øyvind Holm’s history to suggest he had a tune like “Miss Missing You” in him, but damned if he doesn’t grab you by the ears and then sock you in the guts from almost the very beginning of the song. I think what this number (and really what the rest of the record) has going for it is that Deleted Waveform Gatherings is revealed to be not so much just one of those bands with a pop wunderkind with a band unable to do them justice. No, if the nimble bass and absolutely wonderful drums on “Miss Missing You” don’t immediately convey the true group-nature of Deleted Waveform Gatherings, then the inspired electric banjo that goes wending through the second verse absolutely does.
Not that “Miss Missing You” is the only wonderful slice of instantly-memorable guitar pop here. “The Doc” sounds as if all it’s missing is the “Rocks Off” horn section. “Hate Waiting In Line” starts off sounding like Brian Jonestown Massacre before throwing down a descending note chorus that’d make Noel Gallagher green with envy. “Don’t Wanna Know” either sounds like The Who covering late-period Replacements, or vice-versa.
What inevitably hurts a band like Deleted Waveform Gatherings in the commercial marketplace is that there are so many bands attempting the guitar-pop with a Lennon-ish hue thing that do such a mediocre job of executing that vision that when a group comes along possessing the songwriting moxie of an Øyvind Holm and the stiff rocking backbone of the DWG rhythm section, it’s easy to think “I’ve heard this before” without fully realizing that actually no, we haven’t. How good is Ghost, She Said? This good: since they’re sort of working the same territory as Brendan Benson, I decided this list was only big enough for an either/or between them…and Deleted Waveform Gatherings took the prize.
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The (Finally) PopNarcotic Top 20 Of 2009 (Cont.)
And then some co-workers at the restaurant I’m working at are talking music to me, and introducing me to friends, and finding out how much I’m loving this Scottish band called The Pastels and then I’m up in Robb and Matt and Stephanie’s apartment house and they’re spinning records by The Flatmates and the Shop Assistants and the first My Bloody Valentine singles comp and I’m literally feeling an almost amphetamine rush from discovering an entire group of people with whom I share a music taste and who seem to have Plenty More Where That Came From, as it were. Those heady, wonderful, wonderful days at university were where I started to get it sorted, life-wise. I may not have marked a clear path on the map, but from that time forward I knew I wanted to keep hearing music that made me feel the way that music did, and life suddenly had some purpose and got a whole lot more interesting and enjoyable.
And so here we are in 2009 and I’m hearing a New York band called The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart for the first time and I’m thinking “This is the band I’ve been hearing since back then at school.” I mean, I don’t have the foggiest idea how a group of NYC youngsters can hook into a sound as obscure as the C86 indie pop movement that came and went with alarming quickness in the middle 1980’s, but there you go.
The description of TPOBPAH’s music isn’t gonna do it justice, but I’ll try anyway–you take ridiculously fuzzed-out guitars, strum them earnestly, and sing in mostly on-key vocals (thick with British, or in this case faux-Brit accents) and then write one doe-eyed love song dripping with teen angst after another. What that description of the music fails to capture is the exuberance and innocence and naivete required to get this right (and it is perhaps the neatest trick that The Pains turn that they manage to sound incredibly unprepossessing while basically aping a music style that may pre-date the births of the members of the band).
Emo as a movement never really worked because anyone who’s ever felt all wrung-out with angst knows that you can’t really get to those deepest-valleys without also hitting a lot of amazing, glorious peaks of discovery and joy in life. What makes the twee fuzz indiepop of The Pains work so much better than that genre is that they aren’t afraid to express the joys and wide-eyed true belief of young-adulthood (and sadness is just another interesting and unique discovery here). Their ability to transmit that simple feeling of exuberant wonder at all things boy/girl/relationship casts a spell that will make your heart feel 20 again. Hopefully you’ll be transported to airy college apartments, sitting on dusty hardwood floors drinking cheap beer and listening to records with friends…and wanting nothing more than that in life.
“This Love Is Fucking Right”
“Everything With You”
“Stay Alive”
14. The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, S/T
15. The Broadfield Marchers, Displayed In Reflections
16. Police Teeth, Real Size Monster Series
17. The Faraway Places, Out Of The Rain, The Thunder, & The Lightning
18. Crocodiles, Summer of Hate
19. The Idle Hands, The Hearts We Broke On The Way To The Show
20. The Pretty Things With Phillippe DeBarge, S/T
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The (Finally) PopNarcotic Top 20 Of 2009 (Cont.)
Here’s an album that’s been all over and out of my list pretty constantly. I’ve thought at times “this is one of the best 5 records of the year”, while at others I’ve thought “dude, no.” Like so much music, you can wear yourself out playing “spot the influence” with the Broadfield Marchers: singer/guitarist finds that vocal sweet spot between Daltrey and Pollard, the songs clock in at a Dayton-esque average of 2 minutes and feature loopy titles like “Dr. Invincible & The Champions Of Love” or “Where Baxter Meets Willow”. When Magnet described a previous Marchers effort as “sounding like Alex Chilton fronting Guided By Voices” they weren’t far off.
Which, it goes without saying, sets off my “not another band that sounds as if it was trying to pre-fulfill the wishes of some hipster focus group” alarms. Those alarms are nearly shut down by bouncy Bee Thousand tributes like “The Revenge Of Jimbo Bell”…and then go into full retreat when a song as drop-dead gorgeous as “Falling Asleep To Disappear” (which song, in a little over two and a half minutes, manages to achieve pretty much everything The Clientele have been trying to achieve with lesser results for nearly a decade.) (No, no…I love the Clientele….but “Falling Asleep” sounds like them, but just better.)
There’s enough same-ishness here at times to induce listener fatigue, but the brevity of the 2-minute songs helps that quite a bit, and then anthems like “Everyone From Everywhere” or “Incredible Jumpsuit Shaking” step in to yank you fully back into the Broadfield Marchers’ weird little psych-pop world.
“Falling Asleep To Disappear”
“Everyone From Everywhere”
“Incredible Jumpsuit Shaking”
15. The Broadfield Marchers, Displayed In Reflections
16. Police Teeth, Real Size Monster Series
17. The Faraway Places, Out Of The Rain, The Thunder, & The Lightning
18. Crocodiles, Summer of Hate
19. The Idle Hands, The Hearts We Broke On The Way To The Show
20. The Pretty Things With Phillippe DeBarge, S/T
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The (Finally) PopNarcotic Top 20 Of 2009 (Cont.)
Back in the day, bands like Bitch Magnet, Bastro, or Helmet roamed the land, creating deafening slabs of guitar roar. Over the years, these groups eventually left the scene for various reasons, changed their sound, “developed”, in other words. The little secret of the ’80’s midwest postpunk sound was that a lot of bands got the loud guitars part right, but screwed up by leaving the energy and lyrical “young, loud, and snottiness” of punk behind.
So when I say that a lot of the sound of Bellingham, WA band Police Teeth reminds me of that musical movement, I can already see you thinking “oh right; big chunky lurching guitar riffs with the occasional mathrock start-stop thing going on and not much else.” Well, what if we went back a little further. What if we invoke the name of the holy duo of that movement, of the two bands who got it exactly right? What if we mention the two bands who did the postpunk roar with all the energy and piss of the punks intact? What if I told you Police Teeth has a chance to be this generation’s Big Black? What if I said they might end up some day being as relevant as Fugazi? Now how much would you pay?
On Real Size Monster Series, there are some songs that just don’t work as well as they might. Let’s state that right away. But then let’s also say that a song like “Who Wants To Fuck A Millionaire” is worth seeking this album out all by itself. Let’s also say that “Bob Stinson Will Have His Revenge On Ferndale” sounds like Big Black covering a Finn’s Motel pissy rant on career-ism vs. a rock career (“Pee in the cup, No raise!” goes the chorus, followed by an epic bridge: “Do you remember the spreadsheet that you wrote up way back in 1993?/Nobody ever said ‘That changed my life’/Nobody ever said ‘That inspired me.'”)
Heed some advice, yo. Get on this bandwagon right now. Police Teeth’s irreverent, pissy, angry, hilarious guitar fury deserves to be huge and they might just get there. Thousands of people oughta be singing along to the chorus to “Northern California” at concerts. You know how you once felt like maybe The Hold Steady were writing this epic poetry about disaffection in suburbia? Well, this here is the real folk blues, y’know? The Police Teeth album might not be the very best record I heard this year, but it damn straight is the most exciting. In two years I’m going to look at this list and think “Shit, Police Teeth should’ve been in the top five.”
The PopNarcotic Top 20 of 2009:
16. Police Teeth, Real Size Monster Series
17. The Faraway Places, Out Of The Rain, The Thunder, & The Lightning
18. Crocodiles, Summer of Hate
19. The Idle Hands, The Hearts We Broke On The Way To The Show
20. The Pretty Things With Phillippe DeBarge, S/T
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The (Finally) PopNarcotic Top 20 Of 2009 (Cont.)
Out Of The Rain, the Thunder, & The Lightning
To read the band’s own promo materials, they’d have you believe that krautrock pioneers like Can and Neu were a huge influence on their sound. I…guess I hear it. More than that–in fact much more than that, I hear what sounds like a great fat slab of brilliant American rock and roll, a sound that puts me very much in mind of the music that came gushing like a torrent out of the southeastern United States back in the early-to-mid 1980’s. I hear echoes of Pylon and early B-52’s (Chris Colthart and Donna Coppola vocally can’t help but sound a wee bit like the early days of Schneider and Pierson on the bouncy “The Sun Goes West”), traces of Windbreakers and Primitons…and a production sensibility that sounds right out of the good ol’ Drive In Studio.
To be more clear: the guitars on Rain/Thunder/Lightning sound totally fuzzy and totally kick-ass. The hooks on the album go deep and pull you in, even when they’re buried (“F-F-F-F-Fall Down” is the best example; you know that the song title just *has* to be part of a totally great chorus, but they actually ratchet up the tension in the song and make you wait for the coda for the sing-along payoff–but what a payoff it is!) Maybe the best song on the disc is the memorable “You Can Cry”. The song is a slow-building stunner that uncorks an awesome George Harrison guitar figure in the chorus, and it just pushes the song into the upper realm of the best songs of the year.
The PopNarcotic Top 20 of 2009:
17. The Faraway Places, Out Of The Rain, The Thunder, & The Lightning
18. Crocodiles, Summer of Hate
19. The Idle Hands, The Hearts We Broke On The Way To The Show
20. The Pretty Things With Phillippe DeBarge, S/T
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The (Finally) PopNarcotic Top 20 Of 2009 (Cont.)
The PopNarcotic Top 20 of 2009:
18. Crocodiles, Summer of Hate
19. The Idle Hands, The Hearts We Broke On The Way To The Show
20. The Pretty Things With Phillippe DeBarge, S/T
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The (Finally) PopNarcotic Top 20 Of 2009 (Cont.)
The Hearts We Broke On The Way To The Show
This Minneapolis band comes by its UK postpunk feel naturally–they’re led by two Irish ex-pat brothers, Ciaran and Criostoir Daly. The group comes up with a perfect mix of the jaggedy, squawky postpunk of contemporaries like The Fratellis or Arctic Monkeys…but with a heartland sense of melodic hooks. In other words, they’re guilty of all the good sins and few of the bad choices that plague that particular genre; these folks know that the once you’ve wound your song into a corner, the best way to find your way out isn’t to resort to cheap gim-crackery, but instead to pull out a middle-eight like they do on “Sunshine On The Tenements” or the ridiculously catchy/clunky guitar riff on “Liver And Brains”. Is this music a little too obvious? Maybe…but you know you’re cranking the song “Loaded” up and air guitaring around your room when no one’s looking.
Popnarcotic 