“Say No To Love” by The Pains of Being Pure at Heart: More Adorable Than Surprised Kitty?
June 30, 2010
With their self-titled debut last year, New York’s The Pains of Being Pure at Heart established themselves not only as one of the cleverest American indie pop bands to come around since Velocity Girl in the 1990s, but also, unquestionably, the cutest – in both sound and appearance. It was a noisy record, but the noise wasn’t abrasive so much as warm and fuzzy, and when you could hear the lyrics, they were full of puns (“Young Adult Friction”), alt-pop-cultural references, and coy tales of teenage ribaldry. Now, after releasing a more studio-polished EP (Higher Than the Stars) last fall, the band has returned with a new 7″ single (on “sea foam green” vinyl, even!) called “Say No To Love” b/w “Lost Saint”, both sides of which sport a jangly, retro-flavored melancholy that recalls 90s alterna-faves like the Lightning Seeds, the Cranberries, and Ivy. The band’s also put out a video for “Say No To Love” that delivers a 10,000 kiloton bomb of adorable on the viewer. Nibble on this, Suprised Kitty!
First Impressions: Jerrod Niemann
May 24, 2010
Sunday morning, I came downstairs and sort of half-heartedly flipped on the TV. The show I wanted to watch was still a good 18 minutes away, but sometimes it helps in our house to stake the claim in advance. As it happened, my partner must have been watching one of those Bill Engvall-hosted, hey-y’all-check-out-them-rednecks reality shows the night before, and the TV was still tuned to CMT, which – amazing these days, given the “M” in its initials – was actually playing a music video. Blame it on Sunday morning inertia: I didn’t rush to change the channel. But then, after a minute or so of doing nothing in particular – oh, look at the fog out there, it’s gonna be a muggy day, I thought absently to myself while surveying the progress of my garden – I found myself nodding and humming along to the tune they were playing on the TV.
The song, “Lover, Lover”, by one Jerrod Niemann, has one of those ultra-laid-back choruses, the kind conducive to lazy Sunday morning head-nodding, but which also fairly begs to be the soundtrack for all your summer tailgate parties, bonfires, and grill-outs; its simple complaint – you don’t treat me no good no more – delivered without self-pity but with a matter-of-fact cool underscored by richly chorded Opryland harmonies, all accompanied by little more than clapping hands, an acoustic guitar, and a bass drum keeping the downbeat as dutifully, as reliably, as unpretentiously as a 50s sitcom father providing for his family. Boring, bordering on enticing. (Or maybe it’s the other way around?)
In the song’s video, Niemann comes off as a paragon of unspectacular manhood and charmingly impish macho – he’s not going to stick around for further neglect, but he’s not going to get all tear-in-his-beer about it either. Instead – so the video goes – he’ll just sit out on the front steps, looking not-so-bad in blue jeans and a t-shirt, strumming his guitar, singing his song, and, y’know, inviting (or rather, enlisting some of the neighbor kids to put up handwritten posters inviting) passers-by to gut the apartment of all of his corporate career-woman girlfriend’s prized possessions. (Don’t try this on Craigslist!) I’m sure there’s a retrograde comment on the evolution of traditional gender roles in there somewhere, but… shoot, do you hear that bass voice in the harmonies?
Kansas-native Niemann has been making a decent living as a songwriter for the last half-decade or so (although he didn’t write “Lover, Lover” – it’s a Sonia Dada cover), scoring his biggest hit when Garth Brooks recorded “Good Ride Cowboy”, and recording a couple of self-released records along the way. Last year, he became the first artist signed to Brad Paisley‘s new label Sea Gayle Records, and started work on his major label debut Judge Jerrod and the Hung Jury. While citing such old-school country stars as Eddy Arnold, Lefty Frizzell, and George Strait as influences, Niemann doesn’t seem to belabor the typical country image too much. He eschews the traditional cowboy hat for something a little more train conductor. He may be a-pickin’-and-a-grinnin’, but not on a hay bail against a Hee-Haw blue sky backdrop; rather on the front stoop of his building in the shadow of a big city skyline. “Lover, Lover” is a great little song that’s already a Top 20 country hit, but with its effortless, just-this-side-of-gimmicky, Uncle Kracker-ish chorus – the song’s strongest but also most artistically suspect asset – it’s making its way up the Billboard Hot 100 as well.
Judge Jerrod and the Hung Jury is set for a July 13 release and is currently available for pre-order.
From the WTF Files: A Secret Stash of “Soviet Funk”
March 11, 2010
For most of us, the most daring unauthorized use of company property we’ll ever commit is to print off our March Madness brackets for the department pool. Which is amazing given the relatively tame punitive consequences of committing greater corporate sins. I mean, yeah, I’d probably get fired (and deeply embarrassed) if I got caught doing something indecent – say, distributing internet porn, or watching highlights from Glenn Beck – on my work computer. But that’d probably be it. Maybe a misdemeanor charge here or there, a fine, some probation, a bad reference. Whatevs. I’m confident I wouldn’t get dragged out of my home and shot in a city square, or tossed in a jail cell for indefinitely. Maybe it’s the predictable leniency of the punishment that keeps most of us from doing anything brilliant or consequential (and therefore risky) with our acts of petty corporate theft. If we were going to stake our lives on it, it would have to be brilliant, right? 
Meet Pavel Sysoyev, Cold War-era Soviet government employee, and probably the closest thing to Herbie Hancock to ever emerge from the obscure Russian outpost of Abakan, a city of about 160,000 located just north of Mongolia in the Republic of Khakassia in extreme southeastern Siberia. Although to say he “emerged” from Abakan is a bit of a mis-statement. Mr. Sysoyev (who now lives in St. Paul, Minnesota) may, in fact, be more famous now in the American Midwest than he ever was anywhere in Khakassia where the fact that his recordings of his original, American-influenced funk and jazz compositions (and those of a burgeoning local underground he mentored and produced) were made after-hours on top-of-the-line government-owned equipment – and this at a time when American popular musical forms were as freshly and ambiguously legal in the U.S.S.R. as medicinal marijuana is now in the U.S., and far less respectable – made widespread release of his music in his home country a laughable impossibility.
It’s only more than 35 years after the fact that the underground jazz/fusion/funk scene Sysoyev grew under cover of night in his little Soviet-financed musical petrie dish is seeing the light of release, thanks to Minneapolis-based Secret Stash Records, who, just a couple months ago, released an LP called Soviet Funk – Volume 1 (on red vinyl, of course) with a second volume slated for release next week! Soviet Funk – Volume 1 compiles ten instrumental gems (Look, Ma! No language barrier!) from Pavel Sysoyev’s vaults (attic? closet? little cubby hole under the floorboards?), from sessions dating to the early ’70s, a few credited to Sysoyev himself, but also including bands Sysoyev produced like Pomogite and Da/N’et. As startling as the mere existence of these recordings is (not to mention their sudden ready availability to schmos like me), it’s even more startling just how fricking great they are.
The songs themselves are smart and sophisticated, full of jaunty, stylish melodies, unexpected rhythmic twists, and harmonies that occasionally wink-nudge at the Russian classical music tradition the players came from, but the playing is incredible – and incredibly joyful – and the recordings sound as sharp as anything Creed Taylor set to tape in the same time period. For all the musical sophistication behind it though, it’s an immediately groovable record with no shortage of catchy, accessible tunes like the opener “Gostiny Dvor” whose bubbly, flute-driven melody sounds like a forgotten hit single. This is a record that compels you to keep flipping it over (and to keep doing that dorky little dance that you do when you’re fairly certain you’re alone with your record player) instead of browsing your shelves for what to listen to next. [Note: by "record", I mean "not a CD": Secret Stash is a vinyl-only label, but their records do come with .mp3 download cards for those of us who love our iPods as much as our turntables.]
In advance of the release of Soviet Funk – Volume 2, Secret Stash is now offering a free .mp3 download of a track by Pomogite, the seven-minute “Ubijcy v Belyx Xalatax” (did I mention it’s instrumental?) - an explosive saxophone-driven jam full of firework syncopations and out-of-nowhere time changes, bookended by a couple of elegant solo electric piano meditations. Proof that Volume 1 was no fluke - in fact, it’s a strong suggestion that Volume 2 is even better. I can’t wait.
