(Fat Possum)
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Guitar bands are always throwbacks, and yet they're always so very now. Chicago's Smith Westerns are disinterested in replication of a sound; their jolt of freshfaced, effortlessly hook-gushing power pop is a note of solidarity, for all its distortions and embellishments, with the permanent elegance of rock music's most basic strands. And that's why they are impressive, a wonderful force to hear and behold, and that's why their new record Dye It Blonde is the first album in ages that I've owned on vinyl within twenty-four hours of first hearing it. Without question, this will be (in my world, at least) The Record of this spring.
None of this is to say that the Smith Westerns don't have old ideas to recontextualize and play with; for certain, they mean to toy with the past, but only in the manner that anybody would want to, with pervasive and unmitigated joy. The thrill in the bouncy, open-armed Beatles conjurer "Imagine Pt. 3" is overpowering, especially the crisp, smartly recorded vocal sound of Cullen Omori, a genuine talent whose Alex Chilton-like frayed pipes can wrap around a hook in the most seductive way. It's reductive, though, to claim all this as mere power pop. For one thing, it ties itself down to no time or place; for all its recollections, it's inescapably a modern record and is delighted to be such. But the Smith Westerns' way with integration of sounds and ideas -- kids in a candy store -- smacks of young fearlessness. How many bands would temper the irresistable pop (dig that bass!) of "Still New" with a left-field integration of '70s stadium rock straight out of a scene from Almost Famous? And honestly, how many bands are able to factor in equal parts shoegaze and glam rock until something like "All Die Young" sounds like Kevin Shields fronting Slade? That cut is a versatile tower of beautiful angst, but it's tremendously spirited. Totally glam, totally Ziggy Stardust, but totally ours.
It's a credit to Slade, T. Rex, and Bowie that talented kids are still employing their tricks, but more pressingly, it's a credit to the kids that they know just how to use that meaty '70s guitar for its greatest calculated impact, gleefully engineered and maxed out for pleasure. What will end up setting the Smith Westerns apart is the same thing that set the Shins apart ten years ago for all their influence-on-sleeve sonics: a total and admirable subservience to songs. Take last year's advance single "Weekend," which lays out the road map for the album to follow: teasing and expansive, it builds emotional crescendos on melody and its flawless sentiment "Weekends are never fun unless you're around here too." They earn the credit from such finely tuned pure pop to catapult into a singalong like "Fallen in Love," or to make the ridiculous ELO piano on "End of the Night" sound not just charming but like a triumph, sitting aside a tower of vocals intoning weekend-revising lines like "Everybody wants to be a star on a Saturday night" (seriously) to craft what -- you quickly become convinced -- would be easy top 40 radio shit in another time.
The key is, that very subservience -- and the content of the songwriting -- is quietly laying a groundwork for sophistication; this is only album two, but already there's evidence of something even more special. The record's immediate classic is "Dance Away" (not, alas, a Roxy Music cover), which tosses aside the general indie-rock muddiness of Dye It Blonde as though a curtain is opening, and dives into the most undeniable, upbeat dancefloor makeout session 2011 is likely to bring, replete with ingenious left-field tempo changes and an almost smugly assured renewal of college rock's onetime inescapable cliché of the chorus that's slower (but sneakier) than the verse. Like Big Star or the Beatles at their respective best, it's the kind of song that makes a bizarre idea sound like the most commercial pop music notion ever crafted. For this blissful 2:44, the whole world stops, and that's the kind of power one suspects the band will learn to wield all the more mightily in years to come.
As in all the best power pop, every second of Dye It Blonde seems carefully considered, the playing precise but never arid. The songs show a welcome versatility without deadening the pace; the more reflective songs toward the end are still stuffed with top-level pleasure. "Only One" opens with R.E.M.-like folk-rock but circles back to the note-perfect FM radio vocals that are already the band's signature; "Smile" is the prom slow-dance, nodding to the college rockers with its priceless wall-of-sound teenage depression chorus; and closer "Dye the World" plods deliberately like Bowie but brings the love with its unabashed Abbey Road riff. It's a delightfully dirty electric guitar sound that recalls the sort of incongruity that always made glam and garage rock work so well -- it sounds so wrong, which makes it sound so right.
And one can't overstate the importance of that ringing guitar sound all over this pop record in a period of indie rock that's become known for studio manipulation and synthpop worship -- the attempted duplication, rather than evocation, of bygone noises. No interest in that from Smith Westerns; they're young, they're eager, and this is the noise of youth as we have understood it to this point. Rock & roll, right? These boys have captured this moment. I would tell you to watch them closely, but fuck that. Don't watch, listen.
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