Go figure. I spent a considerable amount of copy touting/dissecting the Posies’ 1993 long-player Frosting on the Beater, in anticipation of them playing the album in its entirety last Saturday night–and they went and played a two-hour set that cherry-picked from their entire career. Not that I’m complaining.
Frosting was well-represented–“Dream All Day,” “Solar Sister,” “Flavor of the Month,” and “Burn and Shine” all made appearances–but the band’s set covered the gamut from their 1988 debut Failure, to their newest release, 2010’s Blood/Candy. Several songs off of the latter pushed away at the outer peripheries of the band’s trademark pop–“Accidental Architecture” and “For the Ashes,” in particular, brimmed with odd time signatures and complex harmonics. But the core of the Posies’ sound–the almost telepathic vocal interplay between Stringfellow and co-founder/singer/guitarist Jonathan Auer–remained wonderfully intact.
One of the Posies’ live trump cards has always been their ability to hit those harmonies while still rocking their asses off. Stringfellow was all over the stage Saturday night, jumping and flailing like a cooler Ichabod Crane being electrocuted, while Auer fired off solos and vaulted into the air with rock hero energy. And though the band’s key figures live halfway across the world from one another nowadays (Stringfellow in France, Auer here), they cracked jokes and interacted like they’d never been apart. Bassist Matt Harris and drummer Darius Minwalla bolstered the sound ably, too (Harris won major court-jester bonus points for leading a short impromptu take on the Weird Al Yankovic Kinks parody, “Yoda”).
The highlights were numerous: A gorgeous reading of the Dear 23 ballad, “Apology;” the thundering take on that acrid 1996 chestnut, “Everybody is a Fucking Liar” (no band on the planet delivers cuss words in classic two-part harmonies like the Posies); the closing encore of 1998’s “You’re the Beautiful One” that preserved the song’s devotional romantic core without diminishing the band’s instrumental fire. No need to get fancier on the descriptive adjectives: It was all damned good. Here’s hoping they touch down here as an ensemble again, but soon.
The Posies.
Ken Stringfellow of the Posies.
The Posies' Jon Auer.
The Posies' Ken Stringfellow.
Posies flying everywhere at the Neptune.
Star Anna guest-vocalizes with Ken Stringfellow on the Posies tune, "Licenses to Hide."
As Mary Poppins once posited, a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. And the Posies have spent over twenty years delivering the tartest, most intricate lyrical pills in the sweetest of packages.
That’s a bit of a gross generalization to describe Seattle’s greatest pop band, but it does boil down the band’s appeal–and it addresses the central reason as to why they alternately built a devoted fan base, yet never quite broke into the mainstream.
On the surface, it seems like some sort of major incongruity in the fabric of the universe. After all, band leaders/songwriters/singers Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow burst onto the Northwest music firmament as pop wunderkinds in the late 1980’s, brandishing peerless vocal harmonies and British Invasion-influenced melodies that lodged themselves into the ears with near-parasitic insidiousness. The Posies’ 1990 major label debut, Dear 23, still stands as one of the finest records to come out of this region in the last three decades: To these ears, it’s an epic (and near-perfect) pop album that mixed Auer and Stringfellow’s time-honored sixties influences (The Beatles and The Zombies) with a pinch of Cheap Trick and the acerbic wit of Elvis Costello. Hell, a year or two later, one of the Beatles even covered a song from the record.
The cathartic wail of Grunge was just beginning to emanate from this neck of the woods, however, and a band that couched smart lyrics about relationship angst and the mounting realities of an adult world within carefully-crafted pop songs seemed off-kilter with the prevailing tide. Simply put, a significant portion of disenfranchised kids found the primal scream of Nirvana and Soundgarden more relatable. Dear 23 gained a solid foothold on the College Music charts, but Nevermind became the accidental voice of a generation.
Frosting on the Beater, the Posies’ 1993 follow-up, sounded like a concession to the zeitgeist at first blush. Auer’s and Stringfellow’s guitars roared more often than they chimed, Mike Musberger’s drums thundered with almost chaotic force, and the several of the songs exceeded the five-minute mark with extended squalls of feedback, left-field tangents, and somber starkness. Ironically, the band derided by one local wag as the Northwest’s answer to the Partridge Family had cut an album that was–in its own way–messier and more unpredictable than Nirvana’s immortal pop-culture calling card, Nevermind.
In music geek parlance, if Dear 23 was the Posies’ Sgt. Pepper’s, Frosting on the Beater was their White Album. Critics smitten by the sonic perfection of the Posies’ 1990 platter griped about the inconsistent racket generated by their follow-up (Rolling Stone magazine, significantly, gave Frosting on the Beater a dismissive two-star review when it first came out).
Time has a funny way of vindicating misunderstood records, though. Today, Frosting on the Beater has aged famously, largely because it achieved a louder, riskier, gutsier sound without short-changing Auer and Stringfellow’s harmonic and melodic gifts one iota. And at least two-thirds of the record’s songs are stone masterpieces. “Dream All Day,” the record’s opener, swirls and careens like the best psychedelia. “20 Questions” counters its pit-of-stomach romantic jitters with power-pop feistiness. And the masterful “Lights Out” sounds like an angel’s lullaby, intermittently bum-rushed by a drunken pack of hooligans bashing out T.Rex riffs. More than any other Posies record, Frosting on the Beater cemented their rep as Seattle’s most significant power-pop combo.
The Stranglers' Hugh Cornwell guests on it, so it must be good: Blood/Candy, the Posies' newest CD.
Auer and Stringfellow have amassed pretty amazing resumes as musicians and producers since Frosting. They served a joint fifteen-year stint backing Alex Chilton as half of Big Star, and each released solo records of their own. Auer produced other artists over the last two decades, and Stringfellow did time as a touring member of REM. They’ve also released several other terrific records as the Posies, the most recent of which (2010’s Blood/Candy) shook the tree by wedding their impeccable harmonies with engaging detours into Beach Boys oddball lushness and adventurous instrumentation.
The band will surely touch down at multiple points of their catalog during their gig at the Neptune tomorrow night, but word around the campfire is that they’re playing that beautiful mess of a record, Frosting on the Beater, in its entirety. To paraphrase one of its finest songs, it should be a definite door to another dimension.
(Not to sound like a broken record, but that old mantra of “Arrive early if you can” really applies for tomorrow night’s show, too. Star Anna and the Laughing Dogs occupy the opening slot with Americana that takes a few loud pop jabs of its own, and any fan of the Posies’ sound owes it to themselves to catch the middle set by this town’s other greatest pure-pop band of the hour, Curtains for You.)
"Pardon the onstage nudity. Laundry's fucking expensive here." You am I's Tim Rogers being bare-chested and rockerly at Bumbershoot. (photo by Tony Kay)
Tim Rogers is fucking with my head. Maybe.
A couple of days before the Australian singer/guitarist and his power pop quartet You am I are due to play Bumbershoot, I’m dutifully calling the Los Angeles hotel where he’s staying. I ask the front desk clerk to be put through to room 505–Tim Rogers’ reputed digs for the day. There’s no one occupying that room, the laid-back clerk assures me in a California monotone, but there’s a Jim Rogers in another room. The clerk connects me.
The line goes quiet, and seconds later, a brusque voice answers. It sounds curtly, distinctively American. “Hello!” it barks out.
“Is this Tim Rogers?” I ask, carefully pronouncing the first name to alleviate any misunderstanding.
“Yes, it is,” the blunt voice on the other end replies.
“Tim Rogers, the musician?” I ask uneasily, convinced I’m having a dialogue with some business executive from the Midwest named Jim Rogers.
Suddenly the voice morphs into an airy Aussie tenor. “You mean, Tim Rogers the semi-famous Australian rock star? Yeah, that’s me.”
We vault into our conversation so quickly that I never get to ask Rogers if he was, in fact, intentionally fucking with me. But our initial exchange–and the self-mocking statement at the end of it–pretty effectively anticipate the conversation ahead. He’s been a career musician for over half his life, and he’s got the requisite rock-star anecdotes to back that up; but a streak of self-deprecating humor reflects his full awareness of the absurdity–and the fun–inherent in that lifestyle.
You am I started out in the early 1990’s as one of many snarling grunge-era guitar bands (their first two long-players were produced by Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, for Pete’s sake). But starting with their second record, Hi-Fi Way, You am I picked up the British-Invasion cue from The Who and The Kinks and evolved into a winning power-pop ensemble. Rogers’ singing and songwriting combined (and continues to combine) Ray Davies’ wit and Paul Westerburg’s ragged romanticism with just enough post-punk roar to knock the dust off.
After Nights Without Sleep, the newest release by Seattle band Curtains for You, dropped yesterday, courtesy indie label Spark and Shine Records. If your record collection includes any Beach Boys, Beatles, vintage Harry Nilsson, and/or Posies–and if that jumpy mass occasionally occupying space on the surface of your sleeve is your heart–get thee to your local record store or online music provider, post-haste. Simply put, you won’t hear a better pure-pop record all year.
Vocalist/guitarist Matt Gervais and keyboardist/vocalist Peter Fedofsky (the band’s principal songwriters) share a love for classic songcraft, and best of all, the sensibilities to distill their influences into something far greater than the sum of their parts. Curtains been kicking around the local music firmament for about six years, but the last two years have seen them roaming a creative purple patch.
Their compositional styles–Gervais rooted in slightly more guitar-based rock, Fedofsky lending more ornate (and, obviously, piano-based) touches–compliment each other in stunning fashion. 2009’s awesome What a Lovely Surprise to See You Here provided eleven bittersweet, unabashedly melodic bursts of magic, from Kinks-style ragtime shuffles like ‘Small Change’ to Fab Four-infused rays of sunshine like the luminous “Licorice Skies.” The sonic template remains the same on After Nights Without Sleep, only it’s done even better this time out.
The new record superficially follows the pattern laid down by Curtains on What a Lovely Surprise–five songs by Gervais, five songs by Fedofsky, and one track by a third band member (bassist Nicholas Holman, this time out). It pretty much bolts from the starting gate with a hit: “Daisy,” the album’s opening track, soars on a wave of pulsing drums and dual harmonies; lyrics rife with metaphors uniting square-peg misfits in awkward passion (“Just two daisies trying to fit in/In this rose garden”).
And the jewels keep coming, from the rollicking Beatles gallop of “What Good Am I to You Now?” to the catchy country shuffle of Holman’s “Bronx Zoo Hobo” to the Queen-gone-power-pop “Open Your Eyes.” The closest thing to an Achilles’ heel amongst the proceedings–the record’s sometimes too-polite production–gets ably sidestepped by the intelligent lyrics, and by refreshing bursts of swagger like “Eggs Over Toast,” the best slice-of-life rocker Elvis Costello never recorded.
There’s an enthralling undercurrent of darkness to After Nights Without Sleep that lends a gravity that only surfaced sporadically on What a Lovely Surprise. Make no mistake: this is still a hook-laden pop album. But Gervais’ lovely falsetto pulls a palpable ache from the circus-music bridge of “In the Last of the Light,” and a sense of wistful melancholy colors the Pet Sounds lope of “Photographic Memory.”
After Nights Without Sleep’s centerpiece, “The Wasteland,” stands as the album’s masterstroke, a lushly orchestrated, exquisite mash-up of “Eleanor Rigby” with Nilsson-style twilight romanticism. And when the band bursts into sumptuous wordless harmonies at the end, Curtains for You accomplishes one of pop music’s most cherished hat tricks–namely, making deep-set sadness abidingly beautiful–and irresistibly catchy.
