Valet is a Minneapolis band who released their fine debut album The Glamour Is Contagious in 2002. Their latest, Life on the Installment Plan, came out last year, but “Cop Stories” from the former features a hauntingly wonderful melody, the kind that gets stuck in your head, and in this case…that’s a good thing.
The Dears
On a recent day off, I took my wife’s truck in for a transmission flush. While checking in, the service guy neglected to mention that the entire staff took a whole hour off for lunch, which started about ten minutes after I arrived. In other words, I had serious time on my hands. I flipped through an issue of Spin, then Scientific American, People, Jet, Field and Stream and Redbook before returning to the single copy of Spin because, why not? What else was I going to do? Upon this closer, maybe even desperate inspection of the issue, I noticed a blurb on Montreal that mentioned The Dears, and they sounded pretty cool. Little did I know that a random collection of their MP3s, gathered off a smattering of label websites, would reflect my experiences at the auto shop so perfectly. There’s the smoldering righteous indignation of “Summer of Protest,” the hope and determination of “We Can Have It,” the bitter loss of said hope in “Heartless Romantic,” and finally, the goofy, bouncy happiness of “Corduroy Boy,” also known (in my mind) as “Yeah, I Got the Damn Truck Back!”
The Killingtons
My friend Neal, an extreme-snowboarding pediatrician who also has a Ph.D. in Chemistry, is a big fan of The Killingtons. I can imagine him jumping off a helicopter somewhere in the Cascades or Rockies and carving heroically down the face of a mountain in order to set a broken bone or maybe perform a needed kidney transplant on a young child, who also happens to be snowboarding on the mountain, or maybe he’d just take some tissue samples so he could do some sciencey thing with them like look at them through a microscope. Whatever. Anyway, on his way down, Neal would surely listen to the steady adrenaline of “Weekend Drive” off The Killingtons’ California Life EP. Wait, in that case, maybe it should be Mammoth or Mt. Shasta…
The Essex Green
Hopefully you were familiar with the musical offerings of Merge Records before hearing The Arcade Fire. If not, I hope you’ve done some due diligence since. The Long Goodbye, released in 2003, from The Essex Green is among the many gems in the Merge catalog. Largely underappreciated by the press, public, and perhaps even their label, songs like “The Late Great Cassiopia” alone are worth 10x the current download pricing standard of 99 cents. Thanks to the generosity of the artist however, you pay nothing. Appreciate it!
Marbles
Robert Schneider has a special place in my heart. It’s not just the perfect pop he has cranked out under the monikers of the Apples in Stereo, the Marbles, and Ulysses. You see, he’s such a swell guy. Many years ago, I left Utah with my girlfriend to drive to Denver under the guise of visiting my sister, when in fact, I wanted to see the Apples. By the time we reached Denver, my girlfriend was my fiancée, and the first thing we did upon arriving was head to the Lion’s Lair (oh yeah, it was a dive) to see the Apples with special guests, The Drags. While we didn’t tell them we just got engaged, we did tell them we made the trek from Utah just to see them (and my sister, in case she’s reading). They embraced us as dear friends. The love affair will continue when the Marbles play Memphis on March 24th supporting their new album Expo and Clem Snide.
Clem Snide
For a group that has sounded so methodical for so long, this new, Tennessee Waltzy pace is nearly euphoric. Likewise, there’s a sonic sheen to “Fill Me With Your Light” that seems almost…polished. But beneath all of the unassuming hoopla is the same old song: the guys who come across as more down on themselves than anyone else have this strange power to make us feel a whole lot better about ourselves.
Pepito
I was in New York, briefly, over the weekend with just enough time to buy a cheesecake from Carnegie Deli for my valentine (oh, she loved me for it), and to stroll through Central Park under Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Gates. Piped into my head through the trusty iPod, Pepito’s playful, stuttering pop was a wonderful audio accompanyment.
Yo La Tengo
I have it! Yo La Tengo!
Richard Swift
Richard Swift has gone to great lengths to make his music sound seventy years old. Whether hacking a Victrola into an iMac, or fudging the fuzziness of decades into his recordings, Swift distresses his songs with just enough texture to make you doublecheck the copyright date. None of these lo-fi antics however overshadow the songwriting skills of this post-modern troubadour.
The Insomniacs
Many years ago Sean introduced me to The Three O’Clock, a mod-influenced power pop trio who were strong in the music but displayed a common shortcoming of mod bands: the lyrics were just stupid. “Jet Fighter Man/that’s what I am/cause tanks go too slow.” That’s actually my favorite song by them, but I mean, come on. The Insomniacs are another mod-influenced power pop trio who I turn to when I miss one of my favorite all-time bands, the early ’90s British mod-influenced power pop trio Five Thirty. (I recently had the priviledge of introducing Sean to Five Thirty, a little quid pro quo.) The Insomniacs have almost got it all: bass-shaking snarling (in the mod sense of the word) guitars, tight Small Faces harmonies, enough hooks to knock out Pete Townshend, and a singer whose voice makes him a dead ringer for the singer of Five Thirty. Let’s just not discuss the lyrics.