CD Review: Insound Digital Mixtape July 2009

Quick, how many New Order wannabes can you name? This mixtape seeems to have all of ’em, many of them featured at this year’s Seaport Music Festival. If the original wasn’t enough for you, here are the sons and daughters of Bernard, Gillian and Steve (Peter deserves better than most of this because he’s a good musician whose personal taste in music runs far afield of this catchy but mostly derivative stuff). Let’s see what we have here:

 

Black Moth Super Rainbow – Tooth Decay. Vocoder vox, hypnotic 80s synth, New Order meets Midnight Starr – catchy and simple. They’re playing South St. Seaport on 7/24.

Blank Dogs – Waiting (mix 2). Uptight, untight drums, early New Order i.e. circa Movement, when they were a guitar band but with a late 80s shoegaze edge. Could be better, but it has some promise.

Casiokids – Verdens Storste Land demo. Closer to the synthy stuff New Order were doing on Brotherhood and afterward

Dan Friel – Ghost Town Pt. 1. New Order as played on a dollar-store imitation Casio through the bottom-of-the-line Guitar Center brand amp

Here We Go Magic – Fangela. Less New Order than 60s psychedelic pop done demo-style with a drum machine and barely demo-quality vocals. A good guitar band like the Motion Sick could have a field day with this.

Obits – Two-Headed Coin. Catchy 60s bass riff, reverb-drenched 60s garage guitar, kinda noir. Best track on the cd so far. Hmmm…ought to check this band out sometime. They’re at South St. Seaport on 7/31 opening for Polvo, supposedly sometime around 7.

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart – Come Saturday. Total Teenage Fanclub ripoff, i.e. middle-period Jesus & Mary Chain without any balls. The first real dud here. How come of all these bands so far, only the Obits have ever heard of a minor key?

Polvo – Beggar’s Bowl. Now this kicks ass! Hypnotic swirling intro, evil growling leads, a stomping rhythm section and then some eerie slightly Middle Eastern flourishes. And how about that flameout at the end, damn! Were these guys the best guitar band of the 90s or what? Sounds nothing like New Order either. They’re at South St. Seaport on 7/31.

Ribbons – Inclusion. OK, back to the New Order wannabes, at least this has some passion and some percussive guitars. New Order play Television maybe.

School of Seven Bells – Face to Face on High Places. Arty, kinda 4AD, ornate synth giving way to trebly, minimal Bernard-style guitar, then the synth comes back. So unoriginal. At least they’re not ripping off Pearl Jam.

Slow Club – It Doesn’t Have to Be Beautiful. Rich white kids with a drum machine taking a pitiful stab at bluegrass. Barf.

Superchunk – Misfits and Mistakes. Yawn, booooring. Strictly for 35-and-overs who miss hearing this garbage at college parties in the 90s.

Versus – Eskimo. Not their best song (Fontaine wrote most of their real good ones) – this is just a simple poppy riff over and over again until suddenly the eeriness kicks in. But then it’s gone. Fast forward…

The Wave Pictures – Just Like a Drummer. Oh jeeeezus…a 30-year-old guy singing like he’s 13. And he uses the word “hipster” in a way that might not be a slur. Puke. Next…

Zaza – Sooner or Later. OK, back to the New Order…or maybe Clan of Xymox. This is nice – swoopy, minor-key synth, incisive electric piano and now a little rhythm guitar.      

 

So here’s what you get for free (download it here for the next week): three solid hits, a bunch of ok-to-good stuff and only three real duds. Plus you can dance to most of this. Burn the best of this for your kid sister to help wean her off the Jonas Bros.

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The Lucid Culture Interview: The New Collisions

One of the first things you notice about the New Collisions is how catchy their songs are. How your head starts bobbing to that fast retro 80s dance beat. How they sound like some great new wave band that’s just about to be rediscovered. But there are a zillion retro bands out there. What distinguishes the New Collisions from the rest of the pack is how smart their songs are. “The world’s onfire? Not our problem,” platinum blonde frontwoman Sarah Guild sarcastically chirps on Beautiful and Numb, the centerpiece of their killer new ep (full review here due soon – watch this space). With a potential national breakout gig upcoming at Gillette Stadium (home of the New England Patriots) the Boston band’s on the verge of leaving small club gigs behind. The band’s brain trust, Scott and Sarah Guild (guitar and vocals, respectively) took some time out of their insane schedule, recording with former Cars keyboardist Greg Hawkes, to answer a few questions:

 

Lucid Culture: What happened to the Collisions? Or was it the Old Collisions?

 

Sarah Guild: This is actually a funny story. We’ve lived in Boston for a year and launched the New Collisions about six months ago, so we weren’t too familiar with the Boston scene. There had, apparently, been a successful local band called the Collisions, which broke up a few years ago. When we started to pick up steam, people assumed it was members of the Collisions resurrecting the project. But no press is bad press; there are actually lemmingtrail threads on this [laughs].

 

Scott Guild: Contrary to public opinion, however, we actually wanted to be called the New Collisions. The music is about history, culture, religion, human connection, and all their strange permutations in this era. The collisions are “new” because they are the changes and the tensions that are happening right now, shaping the identity of this generation.

 

LC:  You weren’t even born yet when the bands you resemble were in their heyday. And don’t tell me you grew up listening to classic new wave hits…or did you?

 

Sarah: Yes and no. We were always eclectic, so we grew up listening to everything. When the time came to pick a definite direction for the band, it was the great melodic pop of the 60s and 80s that grabbed us. We love many many kinds of music, but there’s something timeless about Blondie, the Beach Boys, the Kinks, the Cars–we’re trying to make that same kind of musical statement.

 

LC:  I’m curious to know Sarah’s musical background. You belt, you wail, you chirp sometimes. You probably have more stuff up your sleeve than I know about. Is this style you’re using now something you’ve adapted from listening to Missing Persons, or Cindy Lauper, or is it just how you’ve evolved, or what?

 

Sarah: Well, I have a background in classical and choral music, and have sung every type of music on the planet in my brief time on this planet. I’m such an avid fan of so many bands that I imagine you can hear everything from Billie Holiday to Ray Davies in my delivery. But yes, Dale Bozzio especially is a huge influence. Funnily enough, when I started listening to Missing Persons, I was amazed to hear a few vocal tricks that I had been doing for a long time. In any case, it really starts new with every song, trying to find the vocal approach that will fit the melody, the message, the overall feel.

 

LC:  Is there a neat backstory to the band, I mean, something like Scott saw Sarah on the T, looked over her shoulder at her ipod and saw she had Blondie on it…something like that?

 

Scott: Well…we met at college, dropped out together, and then lived in many many places over a few years–England, the south, all over the northeast. Finally we decided to move to Boston and form the New Collisions. The musical direction came from taking our favorite influences and then trying to merge them into something new and unique.

 

LC:  What’s up with the drummer situation, you guys have been like Spinal Tap except that all those drummers are still alive. I’m guessing anyway…

 

Scott: We had a few fill-in players for New York shows, as you rightly discerned. Really it was a search for the right person, which took a few months, but we were too impatient and started gigging anyway! When Zak came along, we knew within the first thirty seconds of the audition.

 

LC:  Whose vintage synthesizer is that, and is the use of all those weird, oscillating settings a deliberate attempt to get an 80s sound? Or do you just genuinely like that vibe?

 

Sarah: Actually, our keyboard player has no background with this kind of music. He somehow has almost the exact musical aesthetic of Greg Hawkes, but he had no knowledge of the man when he wrote most of these lines. Casey brought in his stuff, started messing around, and it all fell into place. Spooky.

 

LC:  For a band with some pretty poppy songs, they’re awfully dark sometimes. I don’t want to open any old wounds, but to what extent do your lyrics draw from personal experience?

 

Scott: Almost none of the lyrics, actually, are about our personal experiences as such. We try to write about the condition-slash-struggles of people our age at this point in history. They’re deeply personal, but not about our personal lives per se.

 

LC:  Were you guys teenage delinquents? The Ones to Wander? Is that what that song’s about?

 

Scott: Ones to Wander is more personal than most. We’ve always been restless, and spent a few years roaming about before settling in Boston to form the New Collisions. Even in high-school, we were always going on odd adventures, getting into trouble, and so forth. When you have that kind of wanderlust, you’re always in tension with people who are living normal, relatively peaceful lives – there’s a huge gap between you. So that song is about having this endless yearning, and trying to survive in a society that doesn’t support it at all. “I don’t know how the rest survive/But oh my eyes, oh my eyes.”

 

LC:  Can you explain Parachutes on the Dance Floor?

 

Scott: This lyric, apparently, is quite obscure I guess [laughs] A parachute catches you when you’re falling. So parachutes on the dancefloor is about living a totally empty, vapid life, based around some mindless job, then finding relief and meaning in music, art, expression, etc. “The world had betrayed me/My parachute’s on the dancefloor.” In our own lives, music has been the saving grace.

 

LC:  You have a big following in Boston, you get great gigs and have a lot of media buzz going there. How has it been you outside your home turf?

 

Sarah: We seem to go over well everywhere–I think it’s that the music is fun and melodic. That being said, it’s hard for a new band to immediately get buzz in a huge city like New York, where none of us live or have lived previously. Also, our first real recordings have been out for less than a month. To answer your question, it’s been great, but we’re excited to see it grow even more.

 

LC:  I’ve always believed that pop music can be smart and accessible at the same time, is that something that factors into what you’re doing or is it just more of an unconscious thing?

 

Sarah: That’s definitely a factor. Our goal is to make fun catchy music that is also about something. We’re trying to have the best of both worlds – Blondie on one hand and Leonard Cohen on the other – serious fun and serious poetry. Hopefully it works!

 

LC:  Here in New York – and I’m seeing elsewhere – there’s been a big backlash against indie rock, musicians and audiences both getting into styles that are more fun. Is fun back in style? Or is the whole indie world full of shit, fun never really ever went away in the first place?

 

Scott: I think fun is definitely coming back into style. It’s kind of a paradox, but I think standing around and sulking is less in vogue when everyone’s broke. When you’re dirt poor and have a horrible job, you want to have some fun with your small amount of money. We’re all paupers and peasants these days.

 

LC:  Unlike a lot of new bands, you draw a remarkably diverse crowd. You even seem to get some of the people who listened to that stuff the first time around in the 80s out of the house. Does that offer some validation of what you’re doing?

 

Sarah: Sure, we want everyone to love us! A good melody, whether it’s Elvis, or the Velvet Underground, or ABBA, or Pat Benatar, is essentially timeless and can connect to everyone. We work hard on the lyrics, but I think we’ll go as far as our melodies can take us. 

 

LC:  What’s the sickest thing that’s ever happened to you at a live show?

 

Scott: Sick as in gross? Or sick as in, “Dude, that was sick!” Hmm…we played a strange show once at the upstairs of this bar, and they put us on this slippery linoleum floor with no carpet for the drums. We were all falling and moving positions, a cymbal stand went flying past Sarah in the middle of one song…it was a gig on a slip-and-slide. Fun, but we would never ever do it again.

 

LC:  OK, now what’s the best thing?

 

Sarah: Well, we had Greg Hawkes from The Cars sit in with us for three songs at our ep release show last month [TT Bears in Boston]. That was an amazing experience and privilege. Performing “You Might Think” with him at the helm, to an absolutely packed house, was probably the high point of our lives as performers. 

 

LC:  Any breaking news about the band we should share? Like, you just got a song on the L Word – oh yeah, that’s off the air. But seriously – you know what I mean…

 

Sarah: Well, we’re headed back into the studio to do two new singles in July, and we’ll also be filming 2-3 music videos. A bunch of really excellent people found out about us and were excited to be involved with the project, so we’re making it happen. There’s going to be a ton of new stuff, and we’ll probably book a tour around releasing it come late summer or early fall.

 

LC:  Any shout-outs you wanna give to good Boston bands? Here’s your chance…

 

Sarah: Yes, yes, and yes. Everyone should check out, in no particular order, the Sterns, the Motion Sick, Freezepop, Passion Pit, and the Luxury.

 

LC: There’s the Boston Phoenix poll too: fans of the band can vote for the New Collisions as Best New Act of 2009.