Some Songs Considered

“No Backbone” – The Lemonheads
(Words/music: Evan Dando and Tom Morgan, available on The Lemonheads, Vagrant 2006) 

For a while, Evan Dando slipped out of the spotlight.  When he brought back his Lemonheads moniker roughly a decade after their last record, Dando came out swinging.  He borrowed the rhythm section from punk legends The Descendents and tore through a collection of songs that seemed to reclaim the “pop punk” label from the mall punk popular during that time.  These songs worked well because they leaned on Dando’s strengths, particularly his gift for melody and his relaxed voice.  However, these tunes benefited almost as much from the Descendents’ paunchiness, giving Dando’s songs a snappiness that highlighted their melodies. 

For all its strengths, though, J Mascis’ guitar dominates “No Backbone.”  From the second Mascis puts pick to string, his nimble lead guitar takes center stage.  Even when it plays a supporting role to Dando’s vocals, Mascis’ fills seem to spur on the rest of the band.  Even without a punchy rhythm section supporting his songs, “No Backbone” would hold up with the rest of Dando’s upbeat compositions.  By adding Mascis to the mix, Dando ensures that his comeback set hit all the right notes.  Even if Dando had an eager audience willing to give any new batch of songs a try, it sounds like he wasn’t taking any chances with anything less than full speed ahead. 

More on The Lemonheads: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm

“Central Standard Time” – The Get Up Kids
(Words/music: Ryan Pope, Robert Pope, Matthew Pryor, Jim Suptic, available on Eudora, Vagrant Records 2001) 

I associate the Get Up Kids with a very specific part of my life – specifically, my senior year of high school – and somewhere along the line it became next to impossible to listen to this band without venturing back into time.  It’s unfortunate, because it’s made it next to impossible to listen to most of their catalog objectively; I feel as though I’d still enjoy these records today if they didn’t immediately conjure up images of me at seventeen.  It’s not that I have negative associations – generally I look back fondly at this time (and at the way I discovered this band, but more on that another time).  Instead, it’s just uncomfortable in the way that’s its uncomfortable to read an old journal entry years later. 

So the question becomes why these songs carry these associations while there are other bands I liked as much (or more) from that same era that are free of this emotional baggage.  My best guess, listening to “Central Standard Time” today for the first time in a while, is that the things I like about this song remind me of myself at that age.  This goes beyond the heart-on-sleeve thing too, as there’s always a place for that kind of emotional discourse.  Instead, it’s the urgency in the song – the way Matt Pryor strains out some of the words, or the way the drums fill in the measures with tiny fills – that that echoes back to the way that the tiniest things felt tremendous.  Like I said, the discomfort comes from me and not the record; “Central Standard Time” is one of the band’s best moments, especially in the way that it cultivates a cool melancholy tone.  It’s the trigger on the firehose of emotions from my teenage years that most days I’m not willing to indulge, if for no other reason than I’d rather not think about how dumb I was back then. 

It’s a shame because I really loved this band.  I guess that’s growing up, though – some things get left behind.

More on The Get Up Kids: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm

“What a Day (For a Night)” – Paul Westerberg
(Words/music: Paul Westerberg, available on Come Feel Me Tremble, Vagrant 2003)

Whether deliberate or by destiny, Paul Westerberg became the same sort of cult folk hero as the ones he emulated in his music.  Today, a generation looks at him with the same awe and reverence that he bestowed upon Alex Chilton (or, to a lesser degree, Kiss).  Since the Replacements fizzled out in the 1990s, Westerberg alternated periods of prolific output with prolonged hibernation.  When he put out music – be it the polished power pop in the mid ‘90s, the raw basement recordings for Vagrant early this decade, or the spasmodic internet-only song collages over the last year – it was always unapologetically Westerberg.  After all, it was his distinctive style and sound – simultaneously rough, unpolished, and beautiful – that earned him the same sort of legacy he admired in the first place.

“What a Day (For a Night)” is representative of Westerberg’s basement-folk period.  It sounds hastily mixed and recorded quickly, and it’s not particularly complex.  Still, for all its raggedness, it radiates with Westerberg’s charm.  Whether it’s the wonderful lead guitar melody played a little too loud or the way Westerberg strains his voice as he tests the upper limit of his range, the imperfections never get in the way of his composition.  In fact, these eccentricities feel charming in Westerberg’s hands.  The whole thing sounds like something a friend could have put together on a four track in his basement, or the type of band one might stumble on playing in a small pub on a random weeknight.  However, no matter how close we approach this Westerberg-ian ideal as the King of the Basement, we’re reminded that while we possess the same parts, we don’t know how to assemble them to make the whole thing so effortless and imperfectly beautiful.  This is why people like me get excited every time a new Westerberg song surfaces out of some random hole on the internet, as it might be the next diamond in the rough.

More on Paul Westerberg: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm

“Nightingale” – Saves The Day
(Words/music: Saves the Day, available on Stay What You Are, Vagrant Records 2001)

While writing an entirely separate post this afternoon (one I finished and decided to save for revision), I re-discovered Stay What You Are, an album I haven’t heard since the first half of this decade.  When I was a senior in high school, I discovered pop-punk through a Get Up Kids album on an end display.  Soon, I was consuming as much pop punk as Napster (and whatever I used after Napster was shut down) could find me – good or bad.  It wasn’t until I got to college that I started to filter the good from the run-of-the-mill (coincidentally, around the time that I started to explore Superchunk’s back catalog, but that’s for another day).  At first, it didn’t matter – it was new music that sounded like music I liked, so I wanted to hear all of it. 

That being said, only a few discs and some stray MP3s made it through that initial sorting period.  As quickly as I developed a taste for pop-punk, I realized that I didn’t enjoy a lot of it.  For every album that I loved, I had three or four other non-descript EPs or albums from bands I couldn’t distinguish from each other.  That being said, Stay What You Are stuck out, perhaps in part because of my obsession with Vagrant Records circa 2000 – 2001, perhaps because Chris Conley’s voice was uniquely melodic and whiny.  However, part of the credit goes to the songwriting - these songs were better than a lot of their peers.  In particular, “Nightingale” stands out as slightly more complex than a lot of the three chord romps playing in my Discman.  Listening to it now, it kind of sounds like the kind of cleanly produced, solidly written pop that comes with a slight “punk” sheen, but I’d be fine if there were more songs like this on the radio.  When compared with his contemporaries, I appreciate Conley’s attention to detail and focus on imagery in his lyrics – his words mirror the (relatively) somber feeling of the music.  It’s probably not something I’d take to right now if I heard it for the first time, but I’m also closer to being thirty than to being a teenager.  That being said, I can still appreciate the care for his craft, something I didn’t always see in some of his contemporaries.

Still, I’m glad I came back across this album, as it’s an interesting personal artifact in addition to a few songs that I’ve missed hearing without even realizing it.  It’s songs like these that act like Proust’s Madeleine, bringing back memories of a very specific time in my life.

More on Saves the Day: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm