Might Want To Print This One Out

James Figurine, "55566688833" - Here's what I really want to say: I don't know how many more chances I have left in me to give Jimmy Tamborello to really put together the kind of musical package that I buy once and never sell. I mean, by this point I've paid cash money for two of his albums (well, okay, the Postal Service album and the "This Is The Dream of Evan and Chan" EP, but I don't even think I've ever met anyone who listens to anything off the DNTEL album outside of that song with any regularity, even online) and actively searched out the James Figurine album as soon as I heard about it, but all I seem to have come away with is a grip of eminently predictable classics and a whole lot of transcendently ignorable filler, and not exactly in the kind of ratio that fills me with enthusiasm as far as my future listening prospects go. Sooner or later you just get sick of the grind - well, unless you're a Radiohead fan, I suppose (AH SEDDIT).

But the catch is that those aforementioned classics are unbelievably classic, especially if you momentarily cross over the boundaries of common sense and actually pay attention to genres. See, like I said, I searched out the James Figurine album with the super-swiftness when I heard about it and, true to form, was overwhelmingly unimpressed by most of it, even that track with Erlend Oye that seems to have the internet goin' nuts at the moment - except for "55566688833", a borderline-unimpeachable classic to my ears the instant it wound itself up. But unlike the rest of Tamborello's output - and probably to the detriment of sales - Mistake Mistake Mistake Mistake in general and "55566688833" only sound tangentially informed by pop music, or at least compared to how much it sounds informed by stuff like Metro Area or the Junior Boys. And being as that I started appreciating all that stuff pretty much the instant I realized that it shared a bunch of the same aesthetic rules as - wait for it - synthpop, you couldn't begin to imagine how many lights started going off inside my head once I connected Tamborello to that aesthetic. My skull was like a fucking Pachinko machine, I kid you not.

I've always noticed synthpop auteurs getting a lot of credit that they haven't earned - not because they didn't do anything significant or come up with anything striking, but just because they didn't do it nearly enough to warrant the volume and ferocity of the praise they earn for their work. I hate to say it, but the classic example is probably Martin Rushent; I own Dare and Homosapien and think they're both great records, but the fact of the matter is that if I'd been born before the era of the skip-track button, I'd probably have been one of those lunkheads calling for his head to be delivered to me on one of Boston's gold records or something. I mean, I love Dare and wouldn't hesitate to call it one of the single most critical albums to ever be released during my tenure on this planet, but the fact of the matter is that I tend to lean on the fast-forward button after "Do Or Die" and not let up until I get to "Don't You Want Me (and let's not even get into Love and Dancing, the instrumental version of the album that came bundled with my copy of Dare; that shit might as well have come wrapped up in a promise ring for all the play it's gotten so far). But really, what can you say? Technology's a fickle, progeria-ridden mistress, and if you're going to make a song where you throw her at the forefront, you better take into consideration that her allure is just about the least permanent thing on this earth. There is, after all, a reason why you haven't seen a Tandy since you graduated from middle school.

It's just that since it's so easy to get distracted by the transparency of synthpop's aging process, it's really easy to overlook unimpeachable songcraft when it happens, which is why I think it's going to take at least ten years before we've really gotten the importance of Jimmy Tamborello sorted out. I mean, people still look at "Such Great Heights" as being a typical Postal Service song, which is just about the stupidest way to look at both that song and that band; it's about as typical of the Postal Service as "Baba O'Reilly" was typical of the Who, i.e. the "type" of song that makes all other songs with which it shares characteristics sound like ass. "Such Great Heights" was the bubbly, non-threatening sound of Give Up distilled into one song, yes, but it was also a way way way way way way way way way better song than anything else on the album - it was light-hearted and aspirational and forthright in a way that didn't so much counteract the bright, shiny surfaces of all the album's laptop fireworxxx as it gave them a chance to actually reflect something human. You could easily make the same argument about "The Dream of Evan and Chan", a song about a beautifully romantic dream that sounds like a beautifully romantic dream, as compared to the rest of the DNTEL album which just sounds like my neighbors vacuuming. Or, you could make the same kind of argument about "55566688833", which I'm about to do right now.

"55566688833" really was a turning point in my appreciation of Tamborello - it's the first song of his that made me think less about how it sounded than about how it could have sounded, which is an incredibly vague way of saying that I really think it sounds self-appropriate like no other song of his before (let alone on the rest of the album). Admittedly, my fixation on propriety in synthpop is inextricably tied to the fact that the first synthpop song ever to really hit home for me was Yaz' "Only You", a song which absolutely has to be included in any discussion of the most studied and restrained examples of pop music in recent (at least) history; it had the effect of turning me into a poignancy junkie, and that's not a particularly easy fix to score when you're talking about a genre with a history of celebrating hideously synthetic drum crashes and arpeggios that couldn't possibly be appreciated without sucking in one's cheeks while keeping an open mouth. "55566688833", then, was like manna from heaven, the distillation of everything I could have ever wanted from a Metro Area release into one concentrated blast - you get your blissed-out low-impact disco workout and your overtly squiggly synths and your gentle, exquisitely tasteful melodramatic buildup towards the end...and then, because it's a Jimmy Tamborello joint, you get actual vocals - better yet, you get actual vocals that actually fit with the song. I mean, the man's made a career out of sounding exhausted with and detached from the modern world; what better arena for his message (in this case, about the trivial-yet-still-damn-near-insurmountable difficulty of humans maintaining a relationship when machines take up so much of our time - and I swear it comes off ten thousand times less Phillp K. Dickish than that in the actual song) than such an exhausted, detached, self-sustaining soundtrack? For once, Tamborello seems to have stumbled over an aesthetic which, if not as immediately or extravagantly pleasurable as his peaks with the Postal Service or DNTEL, may actually enhance the overall product without marking it for dated later on in its life - I mean, how the hell is this blissed-out come-down sound going to age when it's practically of another time already?

Anyway. My point, assuming I ever had one, is that Jimmy Tamborello has now written three inarguably capital-g Great songs, which is impressive enough until you remember that the Guillemots hit that mark inside of a year. It's just that they're such strong songs, and so strong in such a classically useful way (you think it's an accident that both The Greatest Of All Shows and The Greatest Of All Stupid Teen Comedies wrapped up with "Only You"?), that I can't argue with the fact that I'll be checking everything he does out until Judgement Day, even if it means enduring an hour of tedium in the hope of finding one remarkable thing. Well, that or he could just hurry up and put out a Greatest Hits compilation - outside of Weezer's or Jay-Z's, I doubt there's a greatest hits compilation on the historical horizion with a prayer of being better. Seriously. (Click here to preorder Mistake Mistake Mistake Mistake from Amazon.com)

Plan B, "No Good" - Poor Plan B, condemned to a one-way career of being compared to his collaborators in both production and spirit. This writeup, of course, will be no different; I listen to Who Needs Action When You Got Words, and all I hear is Paul Epworth (producer of "No Good" and a few other tracks) and Eminem, especially when B starts pitting threats of over-the-top violence against seemingly sinciere moments of introspection. It's just that, galling as I'm sure it must be, I can't really see the harm; for one thing, as someone who's called The Marshall Mathers LP one of his favorite albums of the decade before, it's nice just to reacquaint myself with a pleasure I left for dead around the time he started making songs about farting on the dancefloor, and for another - and this is key - some of B's songs are really pretty good. I mean, "No Good" might not be a clarion call for originality, but fuck it - he gets a couple of good lines in and has a genuine knack (one, I hasten to point out, which shows up again and again over the course of the album) for when to yield to the hook, a knack that pays off double when you've got a hook as good as the one he borrows from the Prodigy here. Who really gives a fuck if it's not a classic example of artistic flag-planting? Neither was Em's first album, and he ended up with at least one great one to his credit. And while I'm positive that it's the most galling way of achieving an end like this possible, it's worth noting that at least I'm wondering if B has one in him, and that's a hell of a start. (Click here to buy Who Needs Action When You Got Words from Amazon.co.uk)

The Rank Deluxe, "Doll Queue" - This one, well, I don't even want to act like I have an essay in me about it; it is merely a good little skinny-tie indie song currently recieving approximately zero props from anyone outside of England's disastrously cloistered indie community, and frankly it ain't even getting enough there. And that seems a shame to me, because it really is a decent little song which manages to sidestep the single most rankling characteristic of all this post-Interpol nonsense - voice projection. Seriously, someone ought to write a letter to Boy Kill Boy and the Automatic and all the rest of those bands with two or three songs I aaaaaaaaaaaaalmost genuinely like just to say HEY! FUCKERS! Maybe bored dorks like me might give you a little bit more of the leash when it comes to Expressing Stuff Through Song if it didn't sound so much like the fucking Proclaimers by way of My Chemical Romance. I mean, The Rank Deluxe couldn't possibly sound like they were reaching any more than they do on this record - check out the chorus, where the lead singer (whose name I couldn't find despite five epic, drawn-out, far-flung minutes of googling) - but check out how much better the song is for it, or at the very least check out how microscopic of a shit you actually give about the quality of the vocals when you've got a guitar line of such nigglingly effective quality to fill in the gaps. Seriously. Look into it. And anyway, why the hell would you want to sound like Paul Banks in the first place? Everyone knows Carlos D's the one that gets all the poosay in the first place. (Click here to order the "Doll Queue" single from Rough Trade)