Famous Tales Of The Formerly Young and Presently Stupid

Elastica, "Stutter" - I bought Elastica for the first time when I was somewhere in the neighborhood of fourteen and had it for maybe three months before selling it back; needless to say I didn't think it was a particularly great record. Then last year, I downloaded it again on a whim and found myself staring down the chamber of a motherfucking power-pop hand-cannon; needless to say, I couldn't get to Amoeba fast enough and I doubt that they're ever going to see my copy coming across the to-sell desk any time soon now. This is, of course, a painfully normal experience for anyone who listens to music with even the slightest degree of seriousness; we were all stupid kids once, after all, and it's always fun to revise your own history. But Elastica, and more especially "Stutter", feels something of a cut above what I went through for (say) Sleeper's Smart or even Ben Folds' Whatever & Ever Amen, and while I don't want to think that it all comes from celebrating one of my few lucid moments of commerce as a teenager, I think I'm kind of running out of options.

It helps, of course, that Elastica, and again, specifically "Stutter", is motherfucking fantastic, probably the greatest power-pop record of the 90s with the possible exception of Weezer's debut. To answer the immediate questions: yes I'd take this over Parklife/Different Class/(insert whatever Divine Comedy or Manic Street Preachers thing everyone listens to)/etc in the big save-the-rec-center power-pop sweepstakes any day of the year even though it's not a masterpiece - hell, mostly because it's not a masterpiece. Most of my favorite power-pop songs sound incomplete almost by design; I like the fact that Big Star's "Thirteen" doesn't try to rise above the human element that comes naturally with guy + guitar + quaint love song - it could have easily been a tour-de-force of abysmal melodrama like Live's "Lightning Crashes" with some studio around-fuckery, but instead, it is what it is, and what it is rules a gigantic ton. "Stutter", to my ears, is like that; it's a gargantuan racket that lasts about two minutes, which is a near-perfect length for a song about a girl berating her boyfriend for his repeated sexual inadequacy on at least two levels. There is of course also That Chorus, easily one of the least-disputably great choruses in a song in my lifetime; even back when I was just getting acclimated to "Stutter" being a very self-specific kind of great and didn't know the words, I'd still walk around with the chorus in my head just going on the seething inflection in the chorus. Admittedly, it's hardly as spectacular as something like "Common People" or "Girls & Boys", but it's not really all about that - any grandeur to be found on Elastica is pretty much a joyously awesome accident.

I did know all this going into Elastica; fuck, I have clearer memories of reading the issue of CMJ that went bonkers over it than I do of reading Siddhartha. It's just that liking music isn't a controllable process, even if you boil the way you define it down to just yourself, and really the only way to sell people on Elastica (if not Elastica themselves) is to make eye contact with someone and lose your shit over it until they cave in and give it a listen, and then whatever happens, happens. Unfortunately, this method really doesn't work well with kids; they tend to either get hooked on the sweet sweet h-ron of hipping other people to music, or they fail to hip anyone to it and sulk off to find refuge in stuff so tediously and exactingly perfect in its execution that it's practically impossible to hype to normal people. Again, I'm absolutely indicting myself here; there's a very good chance that I sold off Elastica in order to fund the purchase of Tool's Bataan death march of a debut album (if not the first Spacehog album, god have mercy), and you're reading my belated attempt to compensate for years of under-the-radar hair-shirtery right now. It's just that both of these outcomes seem kind of sad to me - they may get you listening to a lot more music, but they don't necessarily get you listening to more music that you enjoy, which on balance is always more important.

The problem as it relates to Elastica is that it's just not an album that stands up to evangelism all that well - in other words, you may want to listen to all those great songs in public, but that's not necessarily the best environment for them. When I listen to Elastica, I tend to skip over all the singles bludgeoned to death by pop culture trying to give 'em to everyone; all those "UGH"s in "Line Up" tend to make me think about how stupid Hackers was rather than how monstrously catchy the song is, and I am all the poorer for it. (Strangely enough, I get a similar vibe from all the songs that palpably rip off Wire [of which there are "more than a few", let's say] - I'd rather enjoy "Connection" than think about "Three Girl Rhumba", but that genie left the bottle a long time ago. Lucky for me, I like a total of maybe three Wire songs, thus demonstrating once again the incalculable value of having no respect for good taste.) Hell, by this point I'm not even sure if Elastica's the kind of album that can be enjoyed in public; outside of "Stutter", which found its way onto nearly every mix CD I made for a couple of months last year, I doubt I'd even be tempted to listen to it around other people.

Fortunately, and this would be my reasoning for this hellacious sell-job on an album most of you already bought and sold back (if the used bins are any indication), Elastica is absolutely one of those albums which, at the end of the day, is Flat Out Easy To Listen To If You Like It At All; I feel pretty confident in saying that I would like the everliving bejesus out of this album even if I never had a single person to sell on it. Now that it's no longer Exciting, it's actually starting to feel kind of, well, exciting, like that moment when you realized that Never Mind The Bollocks had value beyond its history (or, failing that, the moment that you realized that it didn't). It is, in other words, great for exactly the same reasons that put me in the soup ten years ago, except thanks to the benefit of experience that's not going to be a problem anymore. Some might say that's kind of the point of power-pop in the first place; I would just play "Stutter" until my point got through. (For some reason, new copies of Elastica are in excess of twenty bucks new, so if you're feeling thrifty click here to buy Elastica used from Gemm or [more feasibly] check your local store's used bin)

The Bishops, "I Don't Really Know What To Say" - Of course, I'm still just as vulnerable to all that as I ever was. I was actually delayed in hearing "Trains To Brazil" for a couple of weeks since it was part of the same order from Piccadilly that included the debut single by the Bishops; I assume they just didn't print up enough copies of the single to go around since someone from the shop emailed me to say they were waiting on more. It took me forever to get ahold of it, but it didn't take me too many listens to figure out why it sold out so fast - this is exactly the kind of light indie pop song that Belle & Sebastian-style pop classicists eat up with a spoon, only "stripped down" to its sixties roots instead of giving everyone in the schoolyard a chance to improve on it, like a superior version of Yeti or something. Worth checking out. (I can't for the life of me find the single for sale anywhere reputable, so click here to visit the band's site for info and another track)