(Polyvinyl)
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To continue a conversation that seems to have formed a bulk of posts here recently, in the guise of a traditional pop group songs are everything. I herald the return of Fred Thomas and his loose Saturday Looks Good to Me outfit because while they are only a "band" in the sense that the mysterious '60s instrumentalists the Marketts were a band, they are the best formal placement imaginable for Thomas' elaborate, expressive pop creations. He hasn't the cachet of Stephin Merritt or Robert Schneider or even Matthew Sweet or Ian Broudie, but his work encompasses fragments of the best virtues of each. The return of the group after a six-year absence is a pretty decent record: pore over it and you will find hooks and melodies worth remembering, a lot of playfulness and a little soul even, but the record doesn't explode because the songs just aren't as tightly written, or as consistently memorable, as they once were. This is disappointing in part because the prior release, the luminous Fill Up the Room, was one of the best collections of just plain songs by anyone in the last ten years, and a step in the right direction for Thomas in terms of crafting, if you'll forgive the jargon, a unified full-length cohesive statement.
Thomas' analogue dream has upgraded a bit to the 1970s (there's a lot of electric piano), and I detect a stronger attachment to the dreaded Guitar than I recall noticing previously -- an infection almost certainly derived from the emergence (since the last SLGTM album) of bands like Real Estate whose stock in trade is transferring a certain sunny, hard-won optimism and vigor that used to be the parlance of bands like this one and Camera Obscura to the land of jangle-pop. Note the actually stunning multilayered Peter Buck-like guitar line on "Empty Beach," for starters. Thomas' mumbled orchestrations and lush romantics actually seem a bit less complicated and gritty than they once did, perhaps because they are now being sung a bit less memorably. Nevertheless, the best moments are husky and insistent in the best way -- on "Invisible Friend," what remains of the group seems to be collecting itself and then ringing out with renewed glee.
Thomas' preoccupation on One Kiss Ends It All is on the sonic end: lots of stereo trickery and the same fixation on a kind of unpolished purity that used to embellish the songs and even took center stage at times before. On this record, those moments of unexpected dropouts and radio interference and white-noise swells are indeed the most exciting moments. If Thomas seems a bit fussy, it's no shock given what little we can glean of his state of mind: here "you're unhappy with the way you are," there "I don't wanna go back home / and the bars aren't open yet," some "nobody actually wants to be forgiven, they just hate to be wrong," a little bit of "when the money runs out" and a whole lot of "I'm so tired of smiling every time I wanna scream." This is the life of the pop singer in 2013, especially one whose work is going to have to work harder to distinguish itself now in a marketplace glutted with pale-ish but winning imitators She & Him, rejuvenated stalwarts Camera Obscura, and great white hype Cults -- who, it must be said, did nearly everything in the current Thomas playbook with more confidence on their debut except the songs weren't quite up to his standard -- and now he's slipping in that department.
But like Cults, Thomas sees the malaise and desperation inherent to his chosen form everywhere he looks. His best-ever instrument for this was former lead singer Betty Marie Barnes, whose short-lived reentrance here is more than a mild relief, her wonderfully affected deadpan a splendid standout in a tide of the sort of cute-overload vocal this genre typically invites. She's more Ronnie Spector than Fabian, or if you like, more Jenny Lewis than Zooey Deschanel -- but there's little of her here. On "Negative Space," she defines the minimalistic unhinged while Thomas sells it in his soulful electric arrangement; the song wanders off and comes back with full-force choral power and strings, and you start to believe again -- not for the only time here.
From the tricky and breathlessly enthused ("New City") to the yearning and stark ("the Everpresent New Times Condition"), Thomas' melodies and production remain mysterious, charged, and splendidly worked out. The strongest tunes, not surprisingly, encompass the strongest hooks and the moments when the band sounds most like, well, a band. The single "Sunglasses" is one of the stronger examples; beach music with a drum machine, its good-time comes equipped with a bit of Christine McVie regret: the sound of aging. That's maybe the one moment when Thomas is able to fuse his inclination toward new sounds and new adventures in hi-fi with his songcraft. There are fun experiments here and there, like the MBV drumkit tape-futzing on "Polar Bear" (which boasts, it must be said, a glorious ending), and keen homages like the chilly stop-start "Fancy" swim in the murky "Johnny" and a coda on the tower-of-vocals "Break In" that reminds me greatly of that weird "just be a cool guy" interlude on the Smiley Smile version of "Wonderful"... and Skeeter Davis shows up somewhere deep in "Are You Kissing Anyone?". But "Space Children" is more symptomatic of how fragmented Thomas' impulses currently are; its toothy overlength falls flat, taking half its length to get off the ground and lead to an engagingly creepy closing minute.
Still, I know that I'd rather have Thomas back on board messing around and fucking up under the SLGTM spotlight than to see him meander out into oblivion -- and this is a very enjoyable record, even if I don't think it will come to have the staying power of several of his earlier releases; even if not particularly memorable, it has more to offer in the sense of providing a genuine sense of an artist's impulses and skills fusing than a lot of more immediate successes. Or to be more direct, it probably sounds great on the beach.
[SEE ALSO:]
Fill Up the Room (2007)
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