On The Squares

The Squares, "The Edge"
Los Campesinos, "You! Me! Dancing!"
Harry Nilsson, "Vine Street"

Full disclosure: I've known the Squares for years, and I mean that in the "hey, I went to college with these dudes" sense, not the "hey, I bet you could get some ratty indie ass if you started talking about how profound these guys' allegiance to Interpol's first album" sense. I mean, these are people whose beer I've drank, with whom I've argued about the relative merits of UK Garage singles, whose parties have seen me swing for the fences and retire to the dugout more times than I can count. And now, after six years and a whole prior collective persona in the bag, they've finally come out with their debut album, Call Me When Your Boyfriend's Dead, and I don't think I'm grasping at straws when I say...

Well, what do you say in that situation? I mean, anyone who knows me even a little bit - and I suspect that this is the case for at least some of you reading this blog - knows that the quickest way to obliterate any opinion I might hold is to outright ask me to go into it; to someone who'd much rather go through life as a brain in a jar (i.e. me), moments like that only need some loud British guy calling me a coward and pushing me over the top of a foxhole in order for the scene to be complete. It's not even that I mind, dammit - I mean, I'm sure there are still people in Austin sidling towards the door whenever anyone from Voxtrot walks in - but it's still incredibly disarming to suddenly be forced to think about my friends in business terms. I mean, should anyone out there who doesn't know Shaun & Nate & Jeff actually pay money for Call Me When Your Boyfriend's Dead? Well how the fuck would I know?

Typically enough, I tend to blame my high school experiences for this. I've written before about bands I remember from high school, but I don't know if I've ever written about my actual musical experiences from back in the day all that much; this is, by and large, because outside of my mortifying rudeboy days, I had zero musical experiences in high school due to my taste being unimaginably incongruous with, as best as I could tell, everything taking oxygen out of the planet's atmosphere. I mean, fuck, I was That Guy with Talking Heads CDs in the seventh grade, That Guy with a subscription to CMJ, That Guy who both liked and actively campaigned for the wider acceptance of (oh jesus) "electronica"...and then I had to go to my friends' concerts. And of course I had fun there - I mean, you're fifteen and not in the room in your parents' house where you've lived since emerging from the womb; it's pretty hard to not have some measure of fun (not that I wouldn't master the art later, but I DIGRESS). But I sure wasn't having my kind of fun - I can't even begin to count how many times I flashed back to Vercordia concerts at the Cosmic Cantina years later when I'd catch myself parked in front of some immaculately studied movie in film school. It is, after all, completely possible to confront a work of art's value without ever engaging in it for a second; if it weren't, Carlos Santana would have shuffled off the orb decades ago.

I seriously doubt that the late onset of this realization is a rare affliction among musical omnivores; one day, you just wake up thinking "You know what? Fuck the Fall" (or, alternately, "You know what? Fuck everybody except the Fall"), and that's the end of it. But it's not a mode of thinking that leaves you unscarred in other respects; speaking personally, even to this day, whenever people I know ask me about their band, my instinct is to quickly judge whether or not I enjoyed seeing the band and respond accordingly, which, to everyone who's ever asked me about their band, means basically I like your band. Clearly, this is the pinnacle of retardation - by those standards, I basically approve of every band on the planet (except the Mars Volta, who are horrible and should be strangled) - but it happened, and it happened often enough to the point that it's practically learned behavior today. I mean, even now I sometimes catch myself asking the eternally vigilant roundtable discussion that passes for my mind whether or not I like something - which basically means that I don't, since if I liked it, I wouldn't have had to ask.

I'm praying to every god I can dream up that you know where I'm going with this, namely to cut myself a switch off the wiezened old "This is perfectly good music that's just not made for me" tree. I mean, would I have listened to Call Me When Your Boyfriend's Dead if I hadn't drunk my bodyweight in beer at parties thrown by the band? Probably not - but I hasten to add that I'd have probably been listening to stuff that sounds absolutely nothing like it. I mean, long-time readers know my steez; I like production and arrangements and epic, complicated visions turned into ridiculous pop music, and for lack of a better way of putting it, that ain't the Squares by a longshot. The adjective I sorely want to use to describe the Squares is "working class" - not in terms of their influences (unless the Cars and Bloc Party have started occupying the same cultural space as 38 Special or the Boss and nobody told me) or their background (holla), but rather in terms of the way they present their music. There's an undercurrent of faith in work running through Call Me When Your Boyfriend's Dead, faith that a song Can Be Gotten Right If We All Just Bust Our Asses Enough, faith which manifests itself anytime you run up against the notion that they should have spent more time mixing the instruments or fleshing out Shaun's voice or whatever you might happen to encounter that would lead you to remember that this is anything other than a tour-de-force - faith that whatever the Squares may have accomplished with this record, that it's enough for some people and not enough for others, all of whom can go kindly and non-threateningly fuck themselves. It's not that I don't see the appeal here, people.

It's just that unfortunately, I am very literally the worst possible audience for that kind of thing; the world has trained me to listen to music as a product, and there's a deeply-ingrained (bordering on simian) part of my brain that sees applauding bands for brauvura as only slightly more laudable than applauding laundry detergent for the same. Consequently, I find myself drawn irrevocably towards stuff like Los Campesinos' "You! Me! Dancing!" which, in addition to posessing the same sort of indifferance towards those who don't like it, go above and beyond to beat those who might be on the fence over the head with itself; put another way, I like music that has a lot of stuff, and to paraphrase the decidedly non-great Billy Packer, "You! Me! Dancing!" has stuff in places where Call Me When Your Boyfriend's Dead doesn't even have places. Which, of course, is perfectly fine; it's the same siren song that's led me away from Sigur Ros and towards Delia & Gavin, or away from Michael Mayer and towards Daft Punk. And, truth be told, I'm fine with that; I like enjoying music in the context of other people, but at the end of the day, I'll gladly get fucked up all alone in my apartment if it means not having to suffer through yet another tedious Broken Social Scene record. It's just that the wages of sin, apparently, are utter mortification and helpless frustration at evaluating your friends' work - after all, it's literally impossible to imagine your friends' music without your friends being in there.

Or at least, that's what I thought until a few days ago. I've been listening to "Vine Street" more than anything lately - admittedly, the Van Dyke Parks version, a side effect of at long last unlocking the key to Song Cycle's mysteries, although, like any sane person with working ears would do when confronted with the choice, I didn't even have to think twice when deciding whether to upload Parks' version or Harry Nilsson's - and, shock and awe, it's actually kinda been resonating with me, largely because I've been scrambling for an angle on this whole Squares situation for a while now. "Vine Street" is a pretty minor song, but that doesn't diminish its remarkable clarity; no matter whose version you listen to, the song itself remains static in its maudlin examination about what it's like to have a career in music and then have other stuff happening too. And while I'm sure it'll come across as somewhat backhanded to the Squares and everyone I know who's friends with the Squares to see them compared to a song about failing at music, that's not how the song fits for me. Instead, I listen to "Vine Street" and I hear a very straightforward, forthright song sung from the perspective of someone for whom music is a huge part of their life, and that is germane to what I think about the Squares. I mean, sometimes it doesn't matter whether music's good or not, or even whether you like it or not; sometimes music exists independently of Your Own Storied And Unique Experience, and your only involvement is deciding whether you naively bumped into it or accidentally clipped it for lack of paying attention. And, to that extent, I genuinely do think Call Me When Your Boyfriend's Dead has no-foolin' value - if you ever wondered what kind of music Shaun or Nate or Jeff were capable of coming up with, this is about as close to the mark as you're going to get. So there's that.

...

Well, okay, that and they came up with "The Edge", which is an inarguably damn good little slice of Bloc Party-influenced Paranoid Indie Pop which I'd probably have posted even if it'd just shown up randomly in my gmail inbox one day along with the all the stuff I get from random folx. Of course, if that were the case, it would have been weeks, months, before I'd have gotten around to it. But hey, that's what friends are for, right?

Click here to visit the Squares' homepage and contact the band to order Call Me When Your Boyfriend's Dead direct from the band
Click here to visit Los Campesinos' MySpace page for more music
Click here to order Nilsson Sings Newman (or, alternately, here to order Song Cycle) from Amazon.com