I’m excited about Common Loon. I don’t get excited very often.
Pop music still gets the bad rap of being a young person’s folly; and few young people have enough time to absorb the lessons of their predecessors. Perhaps they think they’re “rebelling” by not “conforming.”
Unfortunately, rebellion is not the practical consequence of not learning-the-rules before breaking-the-rules. For pop musicians, tired, rehashed and boring orchestrations are the consequence of not learning-the-rules before breaking-the-rules. If you prefer kindness to bluntness; “well-worn,” “simple,” or just plain “familiar” are useful adjectives.
Common Loon either did their homework, or share an innate sense of timing — and a prescience for avoiding the musically cliché. Their work is not challenging to the ear in the manner of pretentious tonal abstraction art. It’s a natural progression of the form that started in the 60s, not a retread of same.
I’ll be interested to see if they can pull it off in the live.
Adjectives won’t help explain Mordechai in the Mirror. To string together appropriately descriptive words would necessarily create nonsensical phrases. So here goes: Baroque the heavy fantastic; through the future, darkly.
Headliner Scale Model jangle-pop incorporates less pop, and less jangle, than I’ve heard from the genre since I was using someone else’s I.D.
To my ear, the guitars on their recordings sound as if they were plugged directly into the board, rather than through a mic’ed-up amp. There’s very little, if any, affect in the form of effects. Odd, because their videos clearly show the now ubiquitous series of jiggery-pokery pedals arrayed across the stage.
Not producing clever sounds via technical fakery puts the onus for catchiness squarely on the musical composition. Unlike those darned kids of the current era, the members of Scale Model learned to play their instruments first, and then decided to be in a band.
So what does it sound like? Well, for those of you born in 1988, you may be excited to know that it sounds like 1988.
If you missed, or (for some reason) miss, Trito’s Uptown (a convenient two-word label for “the local indie scene’s musical pubescence”) and its simpler era when Poster Children, Smashing Pumpkins, Titanic Love Affair, Tad, The Lemonheads, Run Westy Run and Downey Mildew could be found bewilderedly milling around campus wondering why that pizza cost so much, yet tasted so nasty — here’s your chance. This is what it sounded like.
What it doesn’t sound like is any of the list of influences Scale Model claims. I don’t know if prospective listeners and future fans gravitate towards an unknown quantity based on the band’s self-concept. The neat thing about this inter-web is that you can read a line like:
Drawing influences from bands such as Sunny Day Real Estate, The Cure, Built to Spill, and Sonic Youth, this female-fronted group utilizes counter-pointing guitars and syncopated rhythms
while simultaneously listening to chunes which have absolutely no relationship to Sunny Day Real Estate, The Cure, Built to Spill, or Sonic Youth.
What you you can safely deduce is that these people enjoy listening to Sunny Day Real Estate, The Cure, Built to Spill, and Sonic Youth. If you could be described in the same way, your kindred spirits would enjoy your presence at the Mike and the Molly, Friday.
What I do hear is pre-grunge SST Records, with Swing Out Sister, or maybe Anne Sofie von Otter, on vocals. The SST obsequy is catching on, I think. I first noticed it with erstwhile local band Bellcaster. Someone, somewhere has a collection of cassette tapes; and a near-vinylic reverence for boomboxes. There’s an earnest lament for a simpler time, an era of bland music. It got buried, for some, when Nirvana came along. (Although for me, it was Blur that buried it.) By the time Lovecup and Menthol arrived on the local scene — and quickly made us their bitch — the flaccid guitars of the 80s seemed forever buried. But then, at the time, we thought the same about Bush administrations.
Anyway, Scale Model is like that, but without so much of Bellcaster’s intricate noodling.