music roundup #5: The Jealous Sound / Nada Surf
The Jealous Sound
Kill Them With Kindness
I listen to a lot of music, and over the years I've come to respect, appreciate and adore an increasingly wide variety of music. But my home genre is three-minute power-pop with musical crunch and reasonably literate lyrics: three to five sensitive boys with an ear for guitar hooks, a penchant for metaphor, a youth spent listening to garage rock, and an apparently perpetual inability to stay connected with girls or even just get laid. This is the music that got me into music; this is my most lasting internal soundtrack. It's why I fell in love with Jimmy Eat World's Bleed American on the very first listen, and it's why The Jealous Sound's new CD is the musical equivalent of comfort food for me.
The CD is also just a damn fine CD, and it starts out with two standout songs in a row. "Hope For Us" opens with a quietly rhythmic guitar line, blooms into a typically evocative account of anxiety, and finally crashes into betrayal: "Did you celebrate without me? / Did you tell them all about me? / Did you sell me out? / Well if you ever had a doubt / kiss me on the mouth . . ." Layers of long vocal lines over twitchy guitars - a combination that characterizes many of these songs - are used here to great effect. But the track that stole my heart and hasn't yet given it back is "Naive," arguably the album's most perfect pop song: insistent bass line, syncopated guitar, a beat that kicks in and kicks you right off your ass, and lyrics that oscillate back and forth between oblique free-association and equally oblique narrative. The bottom line is that I have yet to listen to this song without getting up from whatever I'm doing to dance (an impulse I'm gonna have to curb if I want to listen to this album in the car). The price of the CD is worth it for this song alone. I'm not kidding.
Fortunately, you get the rest of the CD with it. "Anxious Arms" is a new and in some ways improved version of the same song off the band's self-titled EP: the production is significantly better, especially as regards the vocal mix (the lyrics are now comprehensible, and since they're worth comprehending that's a big plus), and the song itself has been trimmed and streamlined in a most appealing way. Unfortunately, the tempo's also been slowed down, which makes the whole thing sound less, well, anxious.
Then again, anxiety is pretty much the band's stock in trade, along with bitterness and irony, and there's plenty of all three to be found elsewhere on the CD, but the songs, with the exception of "Recovery Room," are pained without being restrained. "Abandon! Abandon!" and "Troublesome" typify the album's juxtaposition of moods: the former pairs lyrics of illusory uplift ("I am no longer overcome / I am overjoyed") with music that manages to be dark and soaring at once; the latter claims that "nothing will help us / nothing will do / nothing has meaning / nothing but you," but manages to make obsession and resignation sound both appealing and hopeful.
Speaking of hope and obsession, I'm retroactively pissed off that this CD was stuck in record-label limbo for the last couple of years. This is some of the finest musical catharsis I've come across since, well, Bleed American; I should have been getting addicted to it long ago, and I'm only now getting the chance. The only possible upside is that, with any luck, it means we'll be getting a new CD sooner rather than later.
Nada Surf
Let Go
Another comfort-music CD. If The Jealous Sound is desperate, Nada Surf is cautiously optimistic, or at least stoic - and occasionally kind of peacefully stoned. There's more overt musical variation here: mellow ("Blizzard of '77," "Neither Heaven Nor Space"), upbeat ("Happy Kid"), weird ("Fruit Fly"), dark ("Killian's Red"), and a little bit of straight-ahead rock 'n' roll ("The Way You Wear Your Head"). For all that, the album still hangs together remarkably well.
"Happy Kid" sums up the album neatly in its first two lines: "I'm just a happy kid / stuck with the heart of a sad punk." Sad's never sounded so sweetly upbeat as it does here. "Inside of Love," which bears more than a passing resemblance to Travis's gorgeous "Driftwood," is slower and more melancholy: "I know the last page so well / I can't see the first / so I just don't start / it's getting worse . . ." Still, it manages to soar and shimmer and showcase Matthew Caws' falsetto - and, incidentally, to put a new spin on the whole lead-singer-who-can't-get-any phenomenon: "making out with people I hardly know or like / I can't believe what I do / late at night . . ." He does get make-out time, but he wants connection! Look how sensitive! (Don't be fooled by my poking fun, though; Caws infuses every line he sings with an exhaustion and regret that ensure I'm actually empathizing my little heart out while listening.)
"Blonde on Blonde" is the CD's most unambiguously peaceful track; it's a song about walking in the rain that sounds perfect for, well, walking in the rain. "Hi-Speed Soul," perhaps my favorite on an album with a lot of candidates, goes from alienation to coping to aimlessness, but the music is anything but aimless: it packs in more high-energy hooks than any single song should be allowed to have. The unsettling minor-key guitar that opens "Killian's Red" gives way to an even more ominous bassline and lyrics that can be either recovery-from-depression or creepy-new-obsession depending on which way you squint.
"The Way You Wear Your Head" is arguably the album's most immediately appealing song (and appears, not suprisingly, to have been the first single). Deep? No. Kinda silly? Yeah. Catchy? As all get-out. One-third of the lyrics are cribbed directly from Cheap Trick's "I Want You To Want Me" (and then slyly inverted); the sound, though less direct, is no less indebted. You could call that derivative, I guess, or you could acknowledge that power pop is power pop, there are only so many major chord progressions to work with, it's an entertainingly bouncy song, and what the hell more do you want?
The CD winds back down after that, finishing up with "Treading Water," which wanders through two different soundscapes before it snaps into focus at the chorus, and "Paper Boats," an evocation of the blankness of depression that hits my particular kink for mid-tempo wistful songs as album-closers.
Let's be clear: Let Go is neither musically innovative nor lyrically brilliant. But it's shiny and moody at once, earnest and ironic by turns, and it's never less than listenable. It's spent a lot of time in my stereo lately (which is an achievement, since the last couple of months have been good music months); I have a feeling it's going to stay there for a while. And hey - I predicted the same thing about Scout around this time last year, and was listening to them in the car late last week with as much joy as ever.
Here's to knowing what we like.
Kill Them With Kindness
I listen to a lot of music, and over the years I've come to respect, appreciate and adore an increasingly wide variety of music. But my home genre is three-minute power-pop with musical crunch and reasonably literate lyrics: three to five sensitive boys with an ear for guitar hooks, a penchant for metaphor, a youth spent listening to garage rock, and an apparently perpetual inability to stay connected with girls or even just get laid. This is the music that got me into music; this is my most lasting internal soundtrack. It's why I fell in love with Jimmy Eat World's Bleed American on the very first listen, and it's why The Jealous Sound's new CD is the musical equivalent of comfort food for me.
The CD is also just a damn fine CD, and it starts out with two standout songs in a row. "Hope For Us" opens with a quietly rhythmic guitar line, blooms into a typically evocative account of anxiety, and finally crashes into betrayal: "Did you celebrate without me? / Did you tell them all about me? / Did you sell me out? / Well if you ever had a doubt / kiss me on the mouth . . ." Layers of long vocal lines over twitchy guitars - a combination that characterizes many of these songs - are used here to great effect. But the track that stole my heart and hasn't yet given it back is "Naive," arguably the album's most perfect pop song: insistent bass line, syncopated guitar, a beat that kicks in and kicks you right off your ass, and lyrics that oscillate back and forth between oblique free-association and equally oblique narrative. The bottom line is that I have yet to listen to this song without getting up from whatever I'm doing to dance (an impulse I'm gonna have to curb if I want to listen to this album in the car). The price of the CD is worth it for this song alone. I'm not kidding.
Fortunately, you get the rest of the CD with it. "Anxious Arms" is a new and in some ways improved version of the same song off the band's self-titled EP: the production is significantly better, especially as regards the vocal mix (the lyrics are now comprehensible, and since they're worth comprehending that's a big plus), and the song itself has been trimmed and streamlined in a most appealing way. Unfortunately, the tempo's also been slowed down, which makes the whole thing sound less, well, anxious.
Then again, anxiety is pretty much the band's stock in trade, along with bitterness and irony, and there's plenty of all three to be found elsewhere on the CD, but the songs, with the exception of "Recovery Room," are pained without being restrained. "Abandon! Abandon!" and "Troublesome" typify the album's juxtaposition of moods: the former pairs lyrics of illusory uplift ("I am no longer overcome / I am overjoyed") with music that manages to be dark and soaring at once; the latter claims that "nothing will help us / nothing will do / nothing has meaning / nothing but you," but manages to make obsession and resignation sound both appealing and hopeful.
Speaking of hope and obsession, I'm retroactively pissed off that this CD was stuck in record-label limbo for the last couple of years. This is some of the finest musical catharsis I've come across since, well, Bleed American; I should have been getting addicted to it long ago, and I'm only now getting the chance. The only possible upside is that, with any luck, it means we'll be getting a new CD sooner rather than later.
Nada Surf
Let Go
Another comfort-music CD. If The Jealous Sound is desperate, Nada Surf is cautiously optimistic, or at least stoic - and occasionally kind of peacefully stoned. There's more overt musical variation here: mellow ("Blizzard of '77," "Neither Heaven Nor Space"), upbeat ("Happy Kid"), weird ("Fruit Fly"), dark ("Killian's Red"), and a little bit of straight-ahead rock 'n' roll ("The Way You Wear Your Head"). For all that, the album still hangs together remarkably well.
"Happy Kid" sums up the album neatly in its first two lines: "I'm just a happy kid / stuck with the heart of a sad punk." Sad's never sounded so sweetly upbeat as it does here. "Inside of Love," which bears more than a passing resemblance to Travis's gorgeous "Driftwood," is slower and more melancholy: "I know the last page so well / I can't see the first / so I just don't start / it's getting worse . . ." Still, it manages to soar and shimmer and showcase Matthew Caws' falsetto - and, incidentally, to put a new spin on the whole lead-singer-who-can't-get-any phenomenon: "making out with people I hardly know or like / I can't believe what I do / late at night . . ." He does get make-out time, but he wants connection! Look how sensitive! (Don't be fooled by my poking fun, though; Caws infuses every line he sings with an exhaustion and regret that ensure I'm actually empathizing my little heart out while listening.)
"Blonde on Blonde" is the CD's most unambiguously peaceful track; it's a song about walking in the rain that sounds perfect for, well, walking in the rain. "Hi-Speed Soul," perhaps my favorite on an album with a lot of candidates, goes from alienation to coping to aimlessness, but the music is anything but aimless: it packs in more high-energy hooks than any single song should be allowed to have. The unsettling minor-key guitar that opens "Killian's Red" gives way to an even more ominous bassline and lyrics that can be either recovery-from-depression or creepy-new-obsession depending on which way you squint.
"The Way You Wear Your Head" is arguably the album's most immediately appealing song (and appears, not suprisingly, to have been the first single). Deep? No. Kinda silly? Yeah. Catchy? As all get-out. One-third of the lyrics are cribbed directly from Cheap Trick's "I Want You To Want Me" (and then slyly inverted); the sound, though less direct, is no less indebted. You could call that derivative, I guess, or you could acknowledge that power pop is power pop, there are only so many major chord progressions to work with, it's an entertainingly bouncy song, and what the hell more do you want?
The CD winds back down after that, finishing up with "Treading Water," which wanders through two different soundscapes before it snaps into focus at the chorus, and "Paper Boats," an evocation of the blankness of depression that hits my particular kink for mid-tempo wistful songs as album-closers.
Let's be clear: Let Go is neither musically innovative nor lyrically brilliant. But it's shiny and moody at once, earnest and ironic by turns, and it's never less than listenable. It's spent a lot of time in my stereo lately (which is an achievement, since the last couple of months have been good music months); I have a feeling it's going to stay there for a while. And hey - I predicted the same thing about Scout around this time last year, and was listening to them in the car late last week with as much joy as ever.
Here's to knowing what we like.