Two years ago on Valentine's Day my wife found me cavorting with a new pair of speakers. "Those are much bigger than you described," she complained. (Accurately.) "Is this Free Energy?"
"Um. Yes." I calmly replied.
***
That was 2011, which meant that Free Energy's 2010 debut, Stuck on Nothing, was in steady rotation around our apartment. We'd been excited about them since we'd heard the band's earlier incarnation, Hockey Night, doing "For Guys Eyes Only." We had "Dream City" on our 2009 summer mix. We loved the shimmering leaps from one carefree guitar hook to the next. We loved that it was so easy to sing along. Two years ago Stuck on Nothing was road trip music, grilling music and even dinner music. It was the year we went to Mexico.
("Bang Pop")
***
Hearing Free Energy for the first time was like hearing Boston for the first time: crammed in the back of my friend's van, fake-snorting pixie stix and returning from a Boy Scout camping trip with his dad behind the wheel. It was the first time I'd heard guitars that sounded like lasers! And those diamond-tipped vocals! It sounded like Aerosmith, only waxed and polished. We got home and I immediately raced out to buy Don't Look Back and Third Stage. The latter was released in 1986. It was the first album to be certified gold in both CD and LP formats.
"On Third Stage," I bragged to fascinated friends, "Tom Scholz didn't use any synthesizers! He spent six years using real guitars to make synthesizer sounds!"
"Why didn't he just use synths? They chorused.
"HOLLYANN!" I calmly replied.
It was around this phase of my life that I sat down for lunch one day and ate ten spoonfuls of yogurt without realizing that it was actually raw pancake batter.
("Feelin' Satisfied")
***
Free Energy's second album, Love Sign, is out this year in time for Valentine's Day. My wife and I share our speakers now with a cat. The founding equities of this transaction had been well balanced: a great deal on great speakers = one (1) cat one (1) year later. Only then we ended up with a cat whose favorite album is On The Corner by Miles Davis. So while the speakers have been great, the cat is a young Jordan.
One area in which our speakers consistently outperform the young Jordan is sound quality. Another is volume. One album that is well served by each of these performances is Love Sign, by Free Energy. Sometimes we crank "Backscratcher" and watch the young Jordan dunk from the free throw line.
***
Back in college the cross-country team would wake up at nine on Sunday mornings to shuffle through whatever stupor Saturday had sent. After we ran we drank some fucking coffee and cooked some fucking pancakes. We had eggs, too, and probably bacon and whatever it was that Hooley was eating back in those days and Biz had these hemp seeds that he ground with the coffee because that's what Jack down at Stadium said to do...
There were two songs; two live recordings: Bruce Springsteen's "Cadillac Ranch", promising sure salvation just over yonder state line...
Hey there little girlie in those blue jeans so tight
Drivin' alone through that
Wisconsin night!
...and Bob Dylan's "Shelter from the Storm", performed as if not only was there shelter, it had a liquor cabinet!
Suddenly I turned around and she was standin' there!
In that kitchen the role of pancake flipper was nearly as respected as the role of air guitarist.
***
Last weekend I put Love Sign on the Valentine's Day speakers. I wanted to hear it in the kitchen from the living room. It had started to snow and it was a good morning for some fucking pancakes. "Electric Fever" came on and I thought, oh cool, this has that faster-Creedence groove from 'Cool The Engines'! "Girls Want Rock" came on and I thought, oh cool, this sounds like 'Bang Pop'! The young Jordan dunked from the free throw line.
("Electric Fever")
***
Pitchfork had a different reaction:[F]or all of the "That 70s Band" affectations that accompanied their occasionally charming and novel 2010 debut Stuck On Nothing, most of Love Sign is actually slick, subcompact power-pop that traces its lineage from the Cars (without the jittery, new wave idiosyncrasies) to Blue Album Weezer (without the emotional reckoning) to Jimmy Eat World (without the generous heart), and unfortunately, back to latter day Weezer in how it aggressively cops to its own formulism as a preemptive strike against critique.
The pancakes that morning were a modified recipe. I'd halved it, and also we were out of baking powder. "Hey Tonight" came on and I substituted butter.
If so much of Free Energy's praise thus far has taken to the theoretical-- you could totally hear it coming out of an airbrushed van! These could all be hits in 1975!-- it's because none of it feels inspired by anything resembling a real human interaction.
We were out of milk, too. "Hold You Close" came on and I substituted coffee.
Sloan had the encyclopedic knowledge and chops to serve as satisfying meta exercise and compete with the power-pop originals, the Darkness juxtaposed the groupie-slaying connotations of their music with incredibly nerdy puns about STDs, masturbation, and RPGs, Junior Senior traded in subversive and very non-subversive sexual politics, Andrew WK didn't make a record so much as a code of ethics.
My friend's friend does this thing where she'll take a pad of butter and hide it in every few pancakes. She just sets it on top as the pancake surface bubbles. The pancake soaks it up. She calls it the "butter surprise."
And do they ever love those groovy girls who just want to dance all night. That last part is important: seemingly every other song makes some sort of reference to dancing or shaking it all night, but only one is actually called "Dance All Night".
This is true. On Love Sign, Free Energy make no fewer than 15 solicitations for listeners to dance all night. (I'm guessing.) Love Sign thus finds Free Energy offering clear signage for love. Teachers praise this technique as "giving explicit instructions." A corollary principle is called "setting expectations." Good teachers use these strategies to invert a student's prejudices: wait a minute, why aren't you dancing?"
(Backscratcher Live)
***
Pitchfork's Love Sign reviewer also cites his frustration that "a lyric about 'making out with your lip stick gloss' is as close as you get to second base." The full lyric is actually, "Well I feel so boss/making out with your lip stick gloss." Free Energy live in a post-Samberg world. "Boss" belongs to the memes, and the narrow emotional reckoning its rhyme offsets is both deliberate and familiar. Those who worry over the album's lacking in "anything resembling a real human interaction" only beg the question: how recently did this person last experience a real human interaction?
***
Without any baking powder last weekend the pancakes turned out a little bit soggy. But they also tasted like buttery coffee, and after I doused them in syrup they weren't actually that much soggier than normal. I tend to be generous with my syrup.
***
Love Sign is eponymous of the Prince song. The eighth track, "Street Survivor", is eponymous of the Skynyrd album. It is the fact of Love Sign's deliberateness that makes it human -- the fact of its own deliberate appeal to human listeners for real human interaction. It delivers exactly as much as we can share and remember. It is an album that invites air guitars and improvised recipes. Play it on Valentine's Day speakers and dance all night.
("Free Energy" Live)
No comments:
Post a Comment