May 1999 ear candy by Ben Auburn |
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White Elephant
Try as we might, pop music just can't shake the sounds of the sixties.
Sure, there's plenty of seventies and eighties-influenced music, it's
the strategies, the aims, we can't shake, not the sounds. Outside of
weirder electronica, when's the last time you heard an 808 used as
anything but comic relief? [Send all "you're an idiot if you haven't
heard this" comments to ben@smug.com.] But when it comes to the sixties'
tight harmonies, chiming guitars, gutsy organ riffs, or Kinksy melodies,
music makers just can't seem to get enough.
A loose collective of four-track savants based either out of Colorado or
Athens, GA, depending on which magazine you choose as your source, the
Elephant 6 Recording Company has been trying to reproduce the
sixties-in-their-heads for four or five years now. Robert Schneider
seems to be the ringleader, popping up on his own Apples in Stereo as
well as records by compatriots Olivia Tremor Control and Neutral Milk
Hotel; but the whole clan seems to be as loose as a seventies key party,
with AiS, NMH, and OTC members guesting on albums by E6 second-stringers
like Elf Power and Buelah. The three core bands cover a wide swath of
sixties territory, with the Apples staking out the British Invasion, OTC
on the heavy psychedelia and Smile-era Beach Boys tiny-hugeness,
and NMH the drug-crazed ex-folkies, playing campfire songs for lunatics.
Of the three, Jeff Magnum's Neutral Milk Hotel has released the best,
and the loosest, record: 1998's In An Aeroplane Under the Sea was
preposterously good, crammed with weird, hummable melodies and fevered
playing. The recent Olivia Tremor Control release, Black Foliage,
is about as accessible as they'll probably get, minus the odd interlude
here and there and the 10+ minute tape-loop opus -- imagine the Beach
Boys . . . just imagine the Beach Boys, really, only they had the
benefit of Lenny Kaye's Nuggets album and We're Only In It For
The Money.
Still, of all the sixties nostalgists -- and there are plenty more, like
Regia, helmed by an ex Remy Zero drummer and co-produced by Robert
Schneider, or the aforementioned Buelah and Elf Power -- it's a
reformed shoegazer who takes home the prize for getting the most out of
those Perfect Pop sounds that only the crankiest among us don't crave.
Starting out life as My Bloody Valentine advocates, Kurt Heasley's Lilys
threw a curve ball in the form of 1996's Better Can't Make Your Life
Better, under forty minutes of undeniable sixties-esque pop,
including "A Nanny in Manhattan," which gained the band some UK fame
when it was used in a popular Levi's commercial. Better sounds as
fresh as any record made in '96, which is all the more remarkable
considering how much is sounds like a Small Faces record. Heasley has a
knack for ingratiating melody and no respect for A-B-B-A,
verse-chorus-verse song structures. Despite the fuzz-box guitar and
Farfasia organ, the Lilys never sounded dated or like throwbacks -- it's
as if they were building working rocket ships out of wood and spit.
Their new record, The 3-Way, is torn out of the same book, except
it's even better. Heasley aims at a wider target and still manages to
hit right in the middle -- there's the odd trace of bossanova and banjo
here and there, and the songs -- which go from 1:30 to just over seven
minutes -- are even less interested in following rules.
On paper, it sounds dreadful, like a project Beck abandoned long before
making it into the studio, but Heasley's so crafty -- and so obstinate
-- that every piece falls into place. The two epics, "Socs Hip" and "Leo
Ryan (Our Pharaoh's Slave)," are each made up of what feels like an
uncountable number of song fragments. They're songs constructed entirely
out of bridges, moving from one transition to another and looping back
and never losing that essential pop bounce. They're over, and they
couldn't have been more than two and a half minutes -- either that or a
whole, blissful record went by.
The remaining tracks, while just as unconcerned with standard
structures, don't feel like they've been removed from their own larger
settings. They're their own animals, not refugees from other,
non-finished epics -- proof that Heasley's got a master plan, that he's
not just a pop savant who doesn't really know what he's doing.
Look, no critic likes to gush(or wear cargo pants) -- it makes us feel weak (we're very
fragile) -- but The 3-Way, like Built to Spill's Keep It Like
a Secret, is one of those unclassifiable masterpieces, all the more
remarkable because it's built with tools that have mostly been applied
to disposable products. In thirty-six minutes it accomplishes more than
the less inventive and more experimental Black Foliage does in
twice the time. Hopelessly retro and impossibly forward-thinking, the
Lilys are the true archeologist-artists of the sixties tradition, making
Cornell boxes out of the detritus they find on their digs.
in the junk drawer:
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