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The Elected |
| Me First |
| Sub Pop | 2004 | Album |
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In the fifty-year conversation of rock 'n' roll, one topic that keeps coming up is the integration of new technologies with the music's original tools and bedrock conventions. These days, what with the rise of music-editing software like ProTools , even traditionalists are pointing and clicking. (By way of a fr'instance, the first album from Billy Corgan's very "rock" combo Zwan was as tweaked and manipulated as anything by Sasha and Digweed.)
Using computers in the production process is one thing, but stylistically it's still safer to stick to one side of the road or the other, to keep the techno-monster in the closet or let it rage at will. The White Stripes are a good example of the former, Nine Inch Nails of the latter.
But you *can* have your cake and sequence it, too, and "Me First", the new album from L.A. genre-busters The Elected, is a pretty satisfying Rosetta Stone. With their unforced fusion of 60's and 70's country-rock and savvy digital trickery (y'alltronica, anyone?), this group manages to sound both golden-age and up-to-the-minute.
Opening track "7 September 2003" starts with several samples in quick succession over a little dust-bunny beat, but almost immediately swirls into a twangy groove. Golden-hued slide-guitars while away alongside fluttery keyboards, over a no-frills rhythm-section. Singer Blake Sennett's voice owes a lot to the late Elliott Smith, whom the group thank warmly in the liner-notes, but there's a touch of the Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne, and a dollop of the original reedy wailer himself, Neil Young. Sennett's singing is gentle and soft, plaintive and whispery and inseparable from the group's sound.
On the richly layered "Greetings in Braille", Sennett's intimate delivery matches his deeply personal lyrics. As a harmonica wails behind warm acoustic guitars and bubbling Mellotrons, the singer calls out to his old chums by name:
I miss Tara and Melissa, Allen and John
And you'll never have friends like you did when you were young.
But our bodies were pulled away and swept out to the sea.
For the most part, though, Sennett keeps things obtuse and lets the wonderful arrangements carry the day. "A Time For Emily" is like an amber wave, with lush Beatles-Eagles-E. Smith harmonies, big drums and horns and just a smidge of beat-cutting on the way out.
From there it's on to the album's early highlight, the jaunty "Don't Get
Your Hopes Up." This idyllic walk in the park rolls along over a swinging Beach Boys beat and features a killer vocal by Sennett, who pants like Marc Bolan and quavers like Fran Healy of Travis. There's a nice barrelhouse sax solo by Billy Frenzle and even a spot of whistling by Sennett. Good stuff, and the miserable "come back to me" lyrics completely belie the song's pleasant tone:
And all the nights we shared. They never went nowhere.
But they must have meant something. Well, I had my share.
But now you left with all the lunatics up there.
And on the way you'll stop on by and say the words that make you cry like I could never mean a thing to you.
And if it's true, then let me die.
In the hands of less subtle musicians, the Elected's down-home embellishments would sound ironic and forced; as it is, they just sound right. "Waves" opens on a heavenly chorus of Sennetts intoning the lines "Waves roll on by" and quickly kicks into hoedown mode. Mike Bloom's lap steel is all over the place, sliding up and down behind Sennett's voice one moment, stepping out front for some old-timey picking the next.
"The Miles 'Til Home" marries a rock-solid beat to a bass so fat the song seems to lope like a lazy packmule. Bloom is working overtime on the slide-guitar again, and Sennett's aching falsetto will stop your breath, even if his lyrics may seem like a whole lotta nuthin'.
"Go On", beyond coming closest to sounding like one of those mid-90's alt-country bands, highlights a quirk of Sennett's lyric-writing. His songs often seem to be made up of conversations, but since he doesn't use quotation marks when reprints them it can be a challenge for the listener to puzzle out who's talking to whom. One second Sennett's urging his mother to lay off the pills, the next he's telling her about an old girlfriend, then he's talking *to* the old girlfriend, then she's talking to *him*. (The song's priceless moment comes when Sennett learns that said girlfriend has fallen in love. He replies, "If you get married can I come? I gotta see this.") The story is worth unraveling, though, and the song is the hardest rocker on the album. There's even a Wilco-worthy techno-breakdown right in the middle.
Sennett shines his brightest on the album's last two tracks, the spare love song "Don't Blow It" and the break-up chronicle "British Columbia". Sure, he still switches narrative voices in midsentence, but the meanings of these songs are unmistakable even if the words get tangled up in themselves.
"Me First" does a lot of things right. When Sennett plays coy with his lyrics his songs can seem aloof and noncommital, but when he and his band hit their unique groove they bring a Van Dyke Parksian grandeur to a collection of unsettled emotions. |
| Liam Palmer |
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