Buffalo Tom “Taillights Fade”

I mentioned Buffalo Tom in passing recently, and today wanted to fulfill the promise of reminding y’all that they were awesome.

Initially dissed as “Dinosaur Jr. Jr.” (J. Mascis produced their first disc, which I don’t have), these Boston alt rockers had really found their voice by their third platter, 1992’s Let Me Come Over.

The distortion was still there, but the songwriting suggested something a little more heartland, a distillation of Paul Westerberg’s tender moments that mostly ditched the boozy self-destructive streak for pure heatbreak restrained by some hint of stoicism. They became a great folk-rock band that knew how to deploy the weapons of their era.

“Taillights Fade” is my favorite Buf-Tom jam, and it might be everybody else’s. After all, it’s kinda their grand majestic power ballad moment. It’s a bit of a slow-burner, but gets some momentum out of the soft-verse-loud-chorus thing (like I said, weapons of their era).

They do make a nod toward aforementioned boozy self-destruction, the confession “lost my life in cheap wine,” and even wink at their critics to the tune of “I feel like a dinosaur.” “Taillights Fade” was prominent on my pity party soundtrack in college, but at this remove I’m feeling more comfort. Maybe it’s the well-structured, tuneful treatment of ragged emotion. Maybe it’s just that if you’ve still got the strength to sing, then yr not all the way gone.

Let Me Come Over at Newbury Comics. (and at iTunes.)

The Modern Lovers “Girl Friend”

Last week I was on a bus from Springfield, Mass., to NYC, hand in hand with the little lady, both of us listening to her nano through a handy headphone splitter doohickey from Radio Shack. Somehow, to know we were sharing this, listening to the same songs, was a measure of comfort amidst the general misery that comes with Peter Panning it.

Y’all know how much I make out of little coincidences. Predicatbly, when the Modern Lovers’ “Girl Friend” shuffled into our ears shortly after the little lady nudged me and pointed out the Met, the opening namecheck of “the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston” fairly jumped out at me. Wrong town, but right for the moment.

There are many, many things I love about “Girl Friend” (off the band’s delayed self-titled debut, originally released in 1976). There’s the local color; the beautifully wrong, I mean so right, chorus spell-out of “G-I-R-L, F-R-E-N”; the heavy piano action and all its implied drama; the thrumming, lyrical bass; the moment around 1:20 when the dripping need of the song’s sentiment pushes through into an inarticulate yelp and warble that dies almost as soon as it’s breathed out; and that reverbed guitar solo that searches and swoons, outgrowing its conception as a hat tip to Lou Reed.

And, hey, you gotta hand it to lead Lover Jonathan Richman: by song’s end he leaves no doubt as to what it is he wants.

But I’m gonna talk for just another second about that opening assertion. Forlorn and sadly single young Jonathan is sure that if he found a special lady, at that museum “I could look through the paintings/I could look right through them.”

When I was younger, I thought of women as a mystery to solve. There was some sort of literalization of “carnal knowledge” stuck in my head–each object of interest admittedly a mystery I’d likely never solve; I’ve never been a Lothario, maybe a sometimes slut at best.

Now a girlfriend is something that I understand, and maybe I’m a little closer to a truth young Jonathan, his stuffed nose, his tender heart and his professed affinity for all those foxy college girls were all pointing toward.

It’s not really about the lust–lust is essential too, don’t get me wrong–and I’m gonna have young Jonathan back me up by blowing totally out of proportion a little nothing I only just noticed as I was preparing this post.

“Girlfriend” is a compound word, but the title of the song is “Girl Friend.” OK, we’ve established that Jonathan takes liberties with his spelling of the word. But, really, that space maybe adds some extra innocence, like the “space for the Holy Ghost” enforced between a slow-dancing couple at the Friday night Catholic school dances of my youth. (Is that right? Or am I conflating a joke and a genuine memory?)

We’re getting long-winded here, but basically I wanna believe, as young Jonathan did, in an earthly love that helps make things clear. When yr on a good team, it kinda gets to feel that way, and it’s really not that bad.

The Modern Lovers (2003 import reissue) at Amazon.

2006! Woo hoo!

“Sing” | The Dresden Dolls | Yes, Virginia | Roadrunner | 4/18/06 | 4:40 | buy disc/mp3s
I have to be in a particular mood to really get into the cabaret-rock created by Bostonians the Dresden Dolls. Nonetheless, their “let’s put on a show” spirit and pianist/singer Amanda Palmer’s messy candor, on record and over the Internets, charm me no end. They’re an endeavor I want to support, like, philosophically.

But there’s little qualification or doublethink when it comes to my affection for the closing tune on their record this year. Maybe I’m just a sucker for the power ballads. On my first few listens “Sing” was kind of a tearjerker.

I’ll take points off for the line about “the kid with the phone who refuses to sing,” because that just feels like an in-concert call-out, albeit deserved. Otherwise, there’s an incredible generosity of spirit to this song, in message and in execution. You can locate it somewhere between “sing for the president/sing for the terrorist/sing.”

When someone comes out against fear (I know, it doesn’t sound very bold there on the screen, but fuck it, in these times every little bit counts), when a performer invites, encourages, demands her audience to join in, to express themselves… well, I vote “yes.”

“Chips Ahoy!” | The Hold Steady | Boys and Girls in America | Vagrant | 10/3/06 | 3:09 | buy disc/mp3s
I’m a Hold Steady fan, so it was kind of a fig that a song off Boys and Girls would end up somewhere here. On “Chips Ahoy!” they bring the giant overdriven chords, the noodly organ and the hazed-out, gutter-born storytelling. They’ve even added in some gang backing vox to push the anthem button.

But the verse guitar is actually kinda the hook for me. Instead of their usual debauched classic rock pastiche thing, the heavy two-chord riffout recalls the Afghan Whigs, 90s alt-rockers close to mine own heart. It’s got the same bite and forboding that was their stock in trade.

The focus of yr random Hold Steady song will, on the surface, seem to be drink, drugs, good times gone bad, geographical references and self-consciously clever lyrical twists. In a way though, that stuff’s just set dressing.

The point of the chorus here, and really of the song en toto, is sketching out the distance between two people. “How ‘m I supposed to know that yr high if you won’t let me touch you?”–it’s more about the forbidden touch than the self-medication. You don’t need to have been dusted in the dark up in Penetration Park or whatever to relate.

The Secret Stars “Your Life To Live”

In the hope of sending you off to yr weekend in a mood full of both hope and wist(?), here’s some bedroom-recording whispers from the Secret Stars, the now-defunct Boston boy-girl duo interlinked with more rocking concerns like Karate and Ted Leo/Pharmacists.

“Your Life To Live,” off their 1996 self-titled tape, floats along on a sweet love vibe, intimating the dazed infatuation of what sounds to me like the early days of a relationship. Geoff Farina breathes out velvety but emotive lead vocals over smudged acoustic strums and subtle bass accompaniment from Jodi Buonanno.

Even for all the wonder, there’s an edge of anxiety, a sense of capturing a feeling that could fade or a good thing that could slip from yr grasp. The chorus projects the object of affection later possibly on the movie screen rather than in the next seat in the theater, mediated in the future where she’s immediate now. I’m also not sure what to make of a song title that’s more at home as part of a kiss-off rather than a lovestruck paean.

But of course everywhere else, the song overflows with her presence.

This might fall somewhere into the region that’s oft-derided as “twee”–and OK, this tune is totally cute. I was gonna argue that there’s something ballsy in the heart-on-sleeve quality, the torn-valentine earnestness, the subcult hat-tips. But when I think it over the claim feels kinda anachronistic.

I’m fumbling around here, but the sunny yet autumnal feel, and all of the above signifiers, sort of mark this as a document of something we’ve lost in the Interweb age, just dawning at that time. I’m in love with the modern world, but, hey, y’all know I’m also prone to nostalgia.

I could never figure out the handshake–I was more of a spectator and solitary fan–but there was still a sense of inclusiveness for the excluded. Enlisting, through dedication to one or another aesthetic, in a community of outsiders. Shrimper cassettes as membership badge to a secret club. Believe it or not, there was a time when some folks could still say “alternative” without snickering or “indie” without pausing to pick apart that shorthand for all its emptiness and inconsistencies. (The death of that naivete isn’t all bad.)

(There’s a whole other critique we could dive into–way off-track–about buying into an identity, etc., but it’s totally unfair to throw the weight of an entire era, or really of an evergreen pop culture conundrum, on the unassuming heads of TSS and their small-scope song of crushed-out joy.)

Maybe what I’m saying is that the Secret Stars were letting you into their world with these songs about their lives and their friends. There’s some presumption that it would resonate, that yr concerns were in some ways like theirs, yr group of friends like theirs. On second thought that sounds like, I dunno, blogging or vlogging or YouTubing or…

So maybe let’s just talk about a young man, singing in amazement at the gift he’s been given, the perfect girl.

TSS at Newbury Comics. (and at iTunes.)

Pernice Brothers “Grudge F*** (2006)”
Scud Mountain Boys “Grudge ****”

Stop the presses! Two days in a row with 2006 content! (Well, sorta.)

Massachusetts native Joe Pernice has a smooth and increasingly smoky voice that recalls the Zombies’ Colin Blunstone at time, a bad attitude and a gift for insidiuosly catchy melodies.

In the mid-90s he applied these tools to a usually mellow country-rock, in retrospect really eschewing the “alt,” as frontman of the Scud Mountain Boys. His songs fleshed out a sublimely fatalistic vision of low-rent, working-class living that was in some ways uniquely Western Mass. On that group’s great final record, 1996’s Massachusetts, Pernice uncorked what felt like his pinnacle song, “Grudge Fuck.” (I mean, let’s speak plainly here.)

The Scuds took a pristine AM gold melody that could’ve been the result of some sort of Jim Croce-Bread collaboration, and ran it through a dive-bar last-call atmosphere worthy of early Waits. And indeed, it’s a late night tale: the song’s speaker lays down a pretty heavy rap of self-loathing: he’s sloshed, he’s stoned, he’s pleading for his old girlfriend to let him come over.

Some of us may have been to a place like this at one time or another. C’mon, baby. Remember the good times? Whatever happened to us? We’re friends. Friends can cuddle, right? Do you think, just one last time… (I’ll equivocate slightly and at least admit to this song’s setting off the fake nostalgia bells that I so often seek to ring.)

It’s such a pathetic ploy for ex sex–we know he’s lying when he says, “I swear to G-d I’d never touch you,” because after all, “I’d give anything to make it with you/just one more time”–that it crosses over, in and of itself, to bleakest dark comedy.

Ah, but the plot thickens. You see, the song’s not called “Mercy Fuck,” which is what he’s asking for. The implications of the title are postively sinister–namely, it’s all a ruse, this isn’t about lonely desperation but something closer to calculated revenge.

I told you Joe Pernice has a bad attitude.

On last months’s new release Live a Little, the Pernice Brothers, Joe’s going concern in more of a classic pop style, close out with a ten-year anniversary revisit of “Grudge Fuck.” This is clearly designed to: (a) revive the tune, (b) acknowledge it as maybe Joe’s best song, indeed one of the few Scud tunes to carry over to the Bros’ live set, (c) make me say, “Holy shit, I’m getting old,” or (d) all of the above.

The revision is slight. You can just barely hear the cigarettes consumed between 1996 and 2006 sexing up Joe’s vocal chords. The piano’s tinnier, the bass incrementally showier. There’s strings now, but not too sappy, and backing vocals, perhaps a little too sappy.

What’s interesting is that Joe’s muse has moved slightly upscale over the last decade. His chosen subject has moved on from van drunks and scratch ticket addicts to clock-watching temps and dayjob wage slaves in monkey suits. He’s a little more Moz/Elvis C. and a little less, well, mopey version of Croce/Bread. “Grudge Fuck” still carries with it that whiff of the downscale days, so it’s a tad–just a tad, really–out of step with his newer work as a result.

But here’s the thing: my initial reaction to a new Pernice record, at least after the Bros.’ ridiculously poppy and upbeat (sounding) second effort, The World Won’t End, is usually muted. His grasp of pop songwriting craft is so complete that I need to let the discs grow on me. It’s almost too much beauty. I need to give the songs time, need to mine the veins where I’ll find personal resonance.

So, in terms of instant gratification, it’s nice to pick up a Pernice disc and know right away that I love one of the songs on it.

Live a Little at Newbury Comics. (and at iTunes.)
Massachusetts at Target. (and at iTunes.)