“Current Resident” – Tom, 2000

1










Sometime in 2000, Shawn Gallagher of Insane Records started stuffing ballots on twee.net’s “Best Record of All-Time” (or some other silly poll) for Insane releases. I responded by stuffing ballots for my shitty punk band’s home recorded demo. A months-long battle ensued, casualties fell, and when the smoke cleared, Insane had a solid presence in the Top 100. Go Bananas!’ “I’ll Jack You In the Back of the Head,” though, sat well above some Belle & Sebastian record as the raddest thing ever put on tape. Those twee fucks didn’t know what hit them.

Probably didn’t care, either. My little publicity stunt failed to drum up any interest in our partially defunct group. It was around that time that I got handed “Current Resident,” filled with indie-pop, neo-Nuggets, a little punk, and yeah, a little twee.

Listen, I love a good pop song. Prince’s “Kiss,” Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May,” any of Smashmouth’s singles… There’s a base quality in good pop. When you hear one, every part of your mind will question it, look for it’s faults, dissect it and pull it back together, and try to rationalize what you learned. You, appreciator of the deeper side of music, are above this crap! But that kind of rationale just doesn’t work. There’s nothing to think about and nothing that logic can explain: it just takes that good one hook and you find yourself caught on the wrong end of the reel. A great pop song is a smile from a cute girl and a sweet action movie sequence all in one. It’s a high. So I’m not above shutting off any sense of deeper music appreciation that I might have, turning on the reptilian portion of my brain, and become absorbed in pop music.² But after years of listening, I’ve noticed that too many indie-pop songs blur in my head. Twee, in all its cuteness, more often than not fails to capture my base instincts like it’s supposed to. Even most pop-punk, another sub-genre based on catchiness, comes off as bland.

Holly and the Italians’ “Tell That Girl To Shut Up” is a good example. It’s all solid indie-pop here: catchy and up-beat with a post-Ramones pop sensibility. The chorus is one, large melodic hook. Female vocals and lyrics indicating some cat fightin’ in the future? Hell yeah! Individual parts of the song work, but as a whole, it’s just bland. Even the chorus doesn’t make a lasting impression. Here one minute, gone the next. There’s something missing.

Urgency.

I’m not talking about the song’s tempo; I’m talking about its ability to convince the listener that right now, you need it. “Tell That Girl to Shut Up” isn’t urgent. For all of its hooks, the song never makes you think that you can’t go on with your day until it ends. The hook is the end, not the means. It’s a problem that affects a lot of the indie-pop that’s been thrown at us in the past couple decades and, unfortunately, is prevelent in this era of Tom’s musical interest.

Luckily, “Resident” was also made during Tom’s (and my own) peak interest in pro wrestling and that led to “Extreme Theme’s” inclusion.³ It’s absolutely silly and terrible and everything that made Paul Heyman’s little-fed-that-could so fun to watch.

As further luck would have it, there’re still plenty of killer tracks jammed in here between the mostly annoying Heavenly songs. “A Letter To the Coach” is an understated scorcher. Like a lot of Superchunk, it doesn’t come off as particularly pressing at first, but there’s something impetuous under its first layer. “Detroit Bridge” could have been a poster-song for the garage revival in the early 00’s (I mean that in the best way possible). “B Is For Bethlehem” is just pretty darn good. Idlewild’s “Everyone Says You’re Fragile” slays. And then, the highlights:

Small Factory’s “The Last Time We Talked” is the antithesis of my little rant above: an urgent song laden with hooks at the right spot, meeting my reptilian brain’s desire for pop and my heart’s desire to beat a little faster as the chorus builds. It’s a brilliantly crafted song. Everything fits together just right, with timely drum fills and soaring chord progressions that release in bursts. Absolutely awesome and heart-wrenching and rockin’.

“Me, My Drums, and You” does same thing for twee that “Last Time” does for indie-pop: justify the genre. No point in trying to explain. It’s just a good, catchy love song.

And then we get to “Pit Full Of Snakes”... In the past few years, I’ve grown a bigger hip-hop vocabulary. That’s bound to happen when you grow into a mild obsession with the Wu-Tang.⁴ But hearing this RZA-produced⁵ track for the first time in a while, I have to kick myself for not diving into this stuff faster. I’ve always liked this track; At times, it was probably my favorite hip hop song of all time. But I admit that I kind of forgot about it until recently, and that’s unfortunate. “Snakes” is as good as any other Wu-banger. It’s a fantastically EVIL classic of East Coast style that never let’s the listener feel comfortable. The production is appropriately haunting, but the beat keeps simplistic enough to allow that subconscious head nodding.

Final note: I think I love Sloan. “All By Ourselves” follows the Gravediggaz track and, oddly enough, fits perfectly. The “horrorcore” rap and its East Coast tempo flows wonderfully into Canadian power-pop in terms of tempo and beat, if not in mood, style, or purpose.⁶ But, frankly, I think I’m late to the party. Emusic lists 9 LPs and manages to recommend 5 of them. Simply: I’m too far from this band to dive head-first into 9+ LPs of music. They’re littered over every tape Tom gave me for almost a decade and I can’t say a single bad thing about them, but I also have no point of reference as to where I should start. And even if I start now, with much available to me, I feel that it will all feel hollow. They seem like a band that you need to discover and obsess over at a certain time in one’s life, and I have a feeling that time has passed…

¹ This was the first tape where Tom put no effort into the J-card. He simply cut up junk-mail from his cable company in Minneapolis.

² First of all, everyone should have a subscription to Seed magazine. There’re lots of reasons, but one is an article in the 08/08 issue called “The Shape of Music.” In it, Dmitri Tymoczko discusses his study on western music, its melodic structures, mathematics, and the brain’s response to it all. It’s a brief overview of the deeper concept of WHY pop music, in all its forms, has been so prevalent in western music: it might just be the brain telling you how much it loves the mathematic universe we live in. That’s the kind of shit that blows my mind.

³ This tape came paired with a dubbed copy of of the WWF’s “Wrestling Album” from ’85, featuring then wrestling stars “singing” “rock and roll,” including “covers.” Hilarious. The tape also featured a short filler-mix on the b-side, with some ‘Chunk, REM, Ramones, and highlighted by Harry Slash and the Slashtone’s “Huka Blues,” which is the best originally composed entrance theme in wrestling history. I’m usually very, very against using the saxophone in a song. Ever. But “Huka” is seriously rad.

⁴ Reminder: Method Man once shook my hand and called me “fella.”

⁵ …And the second Prince Paul-related track on the tape, with the Handsome Boy Modeling School track, which is also particularly great. I need to hit that stuff.

⁶ On mixes, I describe this as “transitioning” and, intentional or not, Tom hits it out of the park here.