33 rebellions per minute
"Wanderlust, the rooms are too big for us"
1995
Papas Fritas, S/T
If adorability was the sole criterion for an album's greatness -- and right now, as I write this, is a bad time to quiz me on why it's not -- PAPAS FRITAS would be a virtually mandatory inclusion on any list of music's best full-length debuts. My short review is that, fully three years before CITY OF SUBARUS brought Tullycraft onto the world stage (well, perhaps onto the off-off-world stage, on the asteroid equivalent of Teaneck, before a group of cousins, some cute discarded robots the bassist met on the shuttle there, and the alien that Fountains of Wayne wanted for Christmas), Boston's Papas Fritas had made the album Tullycraft (whom I like) meant to. Y'know, if they'd had time to rehearse, or learn to sing, or suchlike. Such practice time didn't cut into the wide-eyed joy of album-making, in the case of PAPAS FRITAS, I assure you. It was a plus.
Tullycraft regularly litter their songs with evidence of semi-fulfilled sonic ambition, and Papas Fritas expanded on this trait. Tony Goddess's guitar line on "Guys Don't Lie" is jittery but aims for a quaint jazz inflection. "Holiday"'s opening actually enhances the strutting, finger-snapping menace of Booker T's "Green Onions". "Passion Play" uses a string quartet, and even composes counterpoint for the separate players. The cymbals churn and simmer on the pedal-steel-inflected "TV Movies", and I think I hear bits of pizzicato in the background. Goddess's hesitant lounge piano on "My Revolution" would probably tell you it wants to be Bruce Hornsby when it grew up, while the far more resonant bass-note piano chords on "Lame To Be" look for soundtrack work. "Explain" shows how Green Day's cheerfully generic "When I Come Around" could be calmed and reshaped into something genuinely tense, questioning, and ready to learn the unexpected (it also shows how a sufficiently extended and thoughtful melody can seem to peak, melodically, in the same note repeated six times). "Possibilities" features, in the background, a fiery and entirely professional electric-blues guitar solo, while "Afterall" closes the album with a fierce, distorted, and proudly dissonant guitar duel.
All of which does nothing to make PAPAS FRITAS less childlike. Goddess's yelping voice slides into the right notes after last-minute evasive maneuvers; Keith Gendel sounds like his voice has only recently deepened, and like that's a crisis he's not ready to deal with yet; Shivika Asthana, whose voice is richly accented but weak and imprecise, enunciates with the bland assurance of someone who knows full-well her parents will join the applause for her middle-school chorus. Nonsense syllables are bounced around, the singers chase each other thorough harmonic rounds and echo each other playfully. "Holiday"'s menace transforms with astonishing ease and flow into a chorus whose "take one of these!" urgings would be rejected by televesion commercials for excess cheeriness. "Wild Life" borrows "Start Me Up"'s groove for the power-pop idiom, with buzzy noises and faithful woodblock timekeeping. "Passion..." uses its string quartet without the slightest apparent notion that when you bow a string, you can even hold it for _longer_ than a quarter note, and the band's own noises chop along rapidly with rarely a hint of sustain. "Wild...", "Smash This World", and "Possibilities" all rock out, but don't suggest any inherent band knowledge that the difference between "rock" and "not rock" could be larger than "rock is the one where you stomp the distortion pedal on the chorus so you don't have to play as many notes".
The lyrics are only slightly worldlier. Papas Fritas write for dating relationships, the kind where who's going to call whom is the big question, where "hanging out" is the central activity, where if you have to hide you pick the basement. "Where backseats are for driving and front seats are for stars" sounds like a potshot, and maybe was meant to be, just like the line dismissing friends at a tough time as "people with the peepholes in their smiles"; but there's no reason the concept of backseat driving couldn't be a concept of impractically eager, but bonding, co-operation, and it's very possible that looking at stars is among the most painlessly romantic uses a car could be put to. People who remember immaturity as carefree are people who do not remember immaturity at all, and perhaps PAPAS FRITAS would be an educational album to play for them. But a spirit unbroken enough to think of "smash this world to pieces" as a proportionate response to being dumped, is a spirit still ready for some awfully remarkable joys. Especially when it does its smashing at a major-key, gang-harmony sprint.
1997
Papas Fritas, HELIOSELF
HEAL YOURSELF, the second album by Pop Has Freed Us (as the authorized translation goes), clearly should have been the breakthrough album where they scored three #1 singles. "Hey Hey You Say", the one that did get bits of college radio play, opens the album bracingly on drones and maracas, and never really breaks form. Goddess's rapidfire monotone vocals fight the robotic drum rhythm; Asthana and Gendel shout along; the calliope plays one note over and over; the 4-note keyboard hook varies over time only in texture; the exotic instrument is the sitar, droningest of the dronely. The edgy half-formed questions of the verses ("Who needs a nurse? Who called the hearse? Who took the chance? Who wants a dance? Who'll lift the curse?") open into a pealing pre-chorus melody that is far less than consoling. "Man on the telephone will never let me/ man on the telephone (Hey!)", they warn in unison, before the beat is cut off prematurely for a panicky chant of "Hey hey, you say". Yet everyone I've ever played it for has instantly identified the song as Pop, and usually as superbly catchy. They're right, without any question in my mind.
"Small Rooms" blasts in on a simple two measures of bass overdrive and quickly sets up a syncopated kick/snare rumble, handclaps, a trebly staccato guitar sound, and a goofy celebratory melody about how our generation has learned to live happily amid the complete collapse of idealism. The chorus is three chords, "I like small rooms!", and a group response "nanana, nana, nanana, nana, na na"; the bridge lifts everything to an even more soaring key. "Words To Sing", a sea shanty blown to ocean size by power-chords and gang-vocals and triumphant one-note keyboard, pushes the volume and sucrose knobs to 11 to sustain the band over serial time signature switches (6, 7, 4, and 9 beats per measure).
I am aware, because I experienced it, that commercial radio chose to associate itself around this time with low-grade moping, and perhaps this is logical: if everyone is depressed by the sonic ambience, a burst-of-energy advertisement telling them what to go buy might seem a desperately needed guidepost. On the other hand, _I_ had always assumed that the way to steal from people's wallets was to get them too happy to blink at the prices; and if I'm right, our corporate overlords really missed the boat on these songs. Which, thought of that way, sounds just as well. But then, I was lucky enough to discover HELIOSELF regardless. What if I hadn't been?
I would, for one thing, have missed Asthana's "Sing About Me", like the Go-Go's electrifying one of the Phil Spector's girl-group classics. I would have missed the steady rumbling catchiness of "We've Got All Night", like if the Cars weren't too cool to emote and weren't too cool to dance like idiots with their best friends.
I'd also have missed a number of songs the debut wouldn't have led me to expect. "Say Goodbye", Asthana's most nearly womanish (least girlish) vocal yet, essays the jazzy melodic sophistication and mechanical calm of Crowded House teaming with New Order, or Squeeze with the Blue Nile. "Rolling In The Sand" is a friendly show tune with eccentric squalling guitar in the background. "Live By The Water", with understated pizzicato, understated music box, and understated reggae guitar, is a tune you'd teach young public school kids, assuming you got an evil pleasure of how every third line lost them. The Spanish guitar solo is nice. "Captain of the City" does reach some windmilling power chords, but its piano and music-hall bits give an overall feel suggesting the Who's TOMMY. "Weight" sounds like a catchy salvaging by a piano student who suddenly realizes he never did practice "the Entertainer" beyond three random bars, and features someone tapdancing in the next room. The quietly soulful "Starting To Be It" could be Leo Sayers doing one of the serious songs from Sesame Street.
At the time, I had no more comment on the stylistic variety than "this is very odd pacing". Which would be, say I, a totally lame reason to not buy any album with as many great songs as HELIOSELF has.
2000
Papas Fritas, BUILDINGS AND GROUNDS
Both the band members and the Boston Phoenix are on record as considering BUILDINGS AND GROUNDS a substantial leap forward, the band's best record yet. This is not an objectively false claim. I've also heard from several sources that GROUNDS sounds like Fleetwood Mac in their prime, which I don't get. Of course, the only Fleetwood Mac album I've heard more than once is TUSK, their weird (and very cool) studio-futzing one, and the only other Fleetwood Mac songs I know are "Rhiannon" and "Don't Stop". GROUNDS does not sound, to me, at all like any of those.
To the degree, however, that I have described Papas Fritas as a band very not in the Fleetwood spirit, GROUNDS is certainly that much of a surprise: "Say Goodbye" and to a lesser extent "Starting To Be It" turned out to be their chosen destiny. "Girl", the album-opener, plays gloomy circus organ behind whispered vocals and a classical guitar exercise. "People Say" strikes me as beautiful, Asthana hitting low notes in a confidently lilting new version of her Indian-accented voice, but it's a country-pop song with Steely Dan overtones in the chorus chord progressions and synthesizer work. The shimmering "I Believe In Fate", a duet, has the detail obsession I'd still expect of Seal were he stuck with a small budget and an inferior drum machine. "It's Over Now" is jazz's equivalent of torch singing, or perhaps just a female equivalent of Art Garfunkel's solo ballads. "Beside You" shows more of Goddess's classical guitar lessons and some softly inventive percussion. "Far From An Answer" is much too dull for me to want to think of descriptions for, and "Lost In A Dream" trots out the pedal-steel in a way I don't, this time, find charming. But "Another Day" and "I'll Be Gone" get enough momentum from their kick-snare beats that they roll out into glisteningly cheerful hooks ("...Day") and sparkling piano plus cocky singing from Ashthana ("...Gone").
And shining out from those two keyholes into their past, "Way You Walk" has a cool synth-pop linearity, with robotic handclaps and unsustained notes and blatanly phased cymbal. "Vertical Lives" brings back high-pitched gang singing, clapping, and buzzy synthesized power-chords like a kiddie-show mauling of Simon and Garfunkel's "How I Was Robert McNamara'ed Into Submission". "What Am I Supposed To Do?" features fist-pound piano, a guitar solo screaking down the scales like chalk down a carefully shudderproof chalkboard, tumbling successions of guitar chords racing after each other, and group singing of childlike urgency. "Questions" is bouncy and exuberant, with tinkly tuned percussion and rhythm piano.
It's not like the old days. Nothing on GROUNDS rocks, and Goddess, though skilled, has apparently forgotten as many guitar lessons as he's absorbed. On the other hand, what they're doing, they're doing thoughtfully and musically and well. The love stories now have two people in them, instead of a confused fraction of one. "People..."'s harrowed portrait of watching a best friend slip away into hard work and rather vengeful ambitions of success; "Way..."'s duet in which the male singer pre-emptively surrenders his relationship claims the instant the girl notices a new guy, and argues his position with an almost belligerent claim to powerlessness; "Another..."'s portrait of two lovers who know each other well enough to synchronize the timing of their realizations that their breakup is petty foolishness: these are not the detailed paintings Papas Fritas could be expected to blast through in the manner of an 8-year-old who's been blessed with the ability to make pop songs out of waterguns and slingshots. So ignore me when I say that dang it, I'd've liked to see 'em try.
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