Guster
“Wooooooooooooooooo!!!!!”
– Every female college student and high school senior in the greater
“I love having seventeen-year-old girls as fans.” – Ryan Miller
“Yeah, this sounds like a band your sister would like.” – Joe Feds
Albums Reviewed:
Guster On Ice: Live From Portland, Maine
As I post this (I typed it like two
weeks ago while I was back in
Guster are very good, and occasionally great songwriters, their two vocalists have shown the ability to share some lovely harmonies, and the hand percussion is admittedly an interesting, if a little amateurish, addition to their sound, but this is where Guster’s advantages end. If you’re looking for incredible guitar riffs, go somewhere else, because this band is all about the songwriting and the harmonies, and all else is secondary. They are so unable to rock it’s almost hilarious, although they seem aware of this and thus rarely ever try. Before they signed to a major label and started producing quality material, Guster sounded like an enthusiastic yet marginally talented bunch of college kids, and unless you’re prone to liking the same music as the guy down the hall in your dorm with the Phish posters on his wall who’s been to ten different Dave Matthews Band shows (or, failing that, unless you are that guy), my advice is to skip this band’s amateur indie college material and move right along to their mature, layered, sweetly melodic major label material. But I say this quietly because I don’t want any hackeysack balls thrown at me.
As
mentioned before, Guster are, from left to right, singer/guitarist Adam
Gardner, percussionist Brian Rosenworcel, and singer/guitarist Ryan
Miller. At least on record (they’re
supposed to be fantastic live, but who knows), neither Miller nor Gardner is
anything more than an energetically average acoustic guitarsmith (no Steve Howe
here, in any case). Vocally,
And, onto the reviews!
Parachute (1995)
Rating: 6
Best Song: “Happy
Frappy”
OK, so I just graduated from
college less than a year ago, and I did so in the
If Eric Cartman is reading, however, it should be noted that these people are not hippies. They’re clean-cut (unlike me, with my floppy hippie hair and beard and unabashed peace-loving liberal proselytizing to fucking twelve-year-olds when I’m supposed to be teaching English, because I really don’t give a shit about teaching English…I’m a CLASSICIST, dammit!) idealists who upon entering senior year will either join Teach for America, sell their soul and apply for Investment Banking jobs, or (if they’re studying something weird and specific like Near-Eastern Languages and Civilizations instead of, say, Economics or English or Government) maybe go to graduate school for a while and wait a few more years to change. If their fiddling around with an acoustic guitar is accompanied by songwriting decent enough to make someone who doesn’t wear Abercrombie and doesn’t attend Dave Matthews Band concerts (like me) listen to their stuff and enjoy it to a degree, however, they can do what these three stereotypical Boston college dudes did and actually try to make it as a band. While they might evolve to become a pretty nice pop band (like these guys did), they’re still gonna have some growing pains, though, and this record stands as an example of a bunch of acoustic guitar-toting college goofs recording an album before they’re ready or willing to be anything more than a bunch of acoustic guitar-toting college goofs. They don’t even use real drums! Brian Rosenworcel calls himself a “conguero” and plays a bunch of bongos and tambourines and little hand cymbals to back up the other two guys playing acoustic guitars and harmonizing. With no bass! Just two acoustics, harmonizing vocals, and bongos. And the cover is the stuffed bear that probably belonged to a chick in their dorm who wears one of those pastel pink Red Sox hats to Fenway Park twice a year and knows nothing about baseball but is nevertheless in love with Johnny Damon (never mind the fact that, when this album was recorded, Johnny Damon was a minor leaguer in the Kansas City Royals organization).
The main reason this record is good at all (and it is) is that, despite being stereotypical Boston college goofs who wear Abercrombie shirts and Birkenstock sandals, Guster were, and are, good songwriters. Few of these melodies have the immediate catchiness and real sharp qualities of the best songs from their last two records, but everything here is pleasant, and most of it makes me forget how funny the idea of this album is, instead inducing me to go “hey, that’s not a bad song they wrote there.” It’s a very homogeneous album. A jumpy violin pops in on “Window,” a bouncy, very undistorted electric guitar makes an appearance on “Scars and Stitches,” some kind of a rapidly plucked mandolin stops in to briefly bogart the weed in “Cocoon,” and the closing title tracks adds a cello in an attempt to be profound, but the rest is straight acoustics, bongos, and other hand-slapped percussion implements. Some songs are fast and bouncy and some are slower and more “thought-provoking,” but all give off the vibe of a bunch of average college guys who have recently discovered they’re pretty good songwriters and are all excited to be recording their own album, indie label and cheap-ass cover art or not. They occasionally try to rock a little bit, like on “Love for Me” and “Dissolve,” but all this involves is strumming the guitars a little harder and making Brian smack those bongos with more alacrity. Needless to say, it doesn’t really work, but it’s still always pleasant. They try nothing with their acoustic guitars beyond well-worn, pleasant, honey-sweet chord sequences that sound nice around a campfire. The two guys can play their guitars pretty well and occasionally toss in a few little trills and runs, but this is rare. The music is pleasant, agreeable, and simple. I can picture them playing college keg parties and then trying in vain to sell copies of their album with the stuffed animal on the front to drunk frat boys who’ve already cranked their stereo up to 11 so they can grind with drunk, insecure freshman chicks to the latest piece of shit from whoever the teen dance sex pop star of the moment happens to be. Fucking TRL music that sucks…
The only song here that goes beyond “pleasant acoustic college music for college kids” is “Happy Frappy” (whose title oddly most sounds like “pleasant acoustic college music for college kids”), which has a nice intro (several instruments coming in one at a time! Subtly building layers! Not just in with the strumming and bongos all the time!), an extremely catchy plucked riff that may or may not be from an electric guitar, and the only truly sharp, memorable hook on the album (the “…and pray I float at all…” line that precedes said happy, neat plucking guitar section). The only other song that attempts to move beyond this type of music is the closing title track, which actually has an outro with strings and a dramatic snare drum roll (which Brian plays with his hands, ofcourse), but at this point the guys were still doofy college students and couldn’t really pull off “profound closer” (actually, they still can’t; every album of theirs has a slow closer with a bunch of histrionics and they usually blow ass; this one is at least pleasant and actually the best one they’ve done). Everything else is just minimalist, pretty acoustic ‘n’ bongo music for college kids, and the occasional violin or whatever the hell that thing in “Cocoon” is (ukulele?) doesn’t change that. The band even makes the music seem more average by having Adam and his regular dude voice sing most of the material instead of Ryan and his super-pretty one, which makes no sense whatsoever. The harmonies are OK, but they’re amateurish and barely even noticeable when compared to the gorgeousness of what Guster has done more recently. So many things on this album are just so obviously the work of a bunch of guys in college who, despite being talented songwriters, don’t really know what they’re doing yet. They can come up with a pretty melody line, but they can’t mold it and craft it yet. They can come up with some nice chord sequences on their acoustic guitars, but they can’t layer the production to make their songs that interesting yet. They can have their two vocalists sing at the same time, but they can’t craft really good harmonies yet. But it’s a very charming and cute record, and the guys’ enthusiasm and earnestness is hard to dislike, even if only one song makes me excited at all. Not nearly ready for prime-time, but since they don’t reach for anything that’s beyond their grasp, pleasant and nice nonetheless.
Goldfly (1997)
Rating: 5
Best Song: “Great
Escape”
What we have here is a band experiencing growing pains. The one-two punch of awesomeness not found anywhere on Parachute at the beginning fooled me for a while into thinking this record was a definite step up from its predecessor, but further listening opened my ears to the fact that much of what comes after the fantastic opening duo is not only weaker, but actually sucks ass, thus leading to the not-good rating you see a few inches above what I’m typing right now. “Great Escape” is a tight, concise, catchy, rocking pop song that rules, and the ballad “Demons” provides a melody prettier and lovelier than anything the band shat out on Parachute, and for that I congratulate these three young men: with these two tunes, they have moved beyond the generic college music for kids in Abercrombie shirts that colored 99.9% of their debut album. This is good.
However, this is not a 2-side
single release. This is a full record
album. It’s 45 minutes long and there
are 10 songs and a horrendous “experimental” bonus track. The guys are clearly well aware that their
debut was generic college music, so they attempt to make artsier and more
interesting pop throughout, but the problem is that, as I’ve mentioned, they
only succeed twice. The rest of the
album ranges from mediocre material that doesn’t do anything different from Parachute
at all to outright crap. The song
immediately after the big opening duo, “Perfect,” is a nice, enjoyable tune,
for instance, but I don’t feel that it does anything the debut didn’t. I suppose it has an actual bass line (as does
most of the album…that piece of their shtick didn’t last long, did it?), but
the more “hard rocking” section sounds exactly like the couple of times that
tried unsuccessfully to do that on Parachute, like if they just strum HARDER and bang
their bongos HARDER the song will “rock.”
Well, it does not. It is catchy,
yes (I do like it, after all), but that’s sort of all
it is (just like nearly every song on the debut). “Medicine” is like this, too. It doesn’t even have an intro. Just jumps in. Like EVERY SONG ON THE DEBUT ALBUM I JUST GOT
DONE CALLING “AMATEURISH.” Come on.
These tunes aren’t indicative of the record as a whole, though, because
the guys do try all sorts of things elsewhere to try to
seem more “adult” and less “jerky college dork.” The one thing I can fully support is the
vocals. Ryan and his prettiness finally
get to sing lead on nearly everything, and the harmonies between Adam and Ryan
are cleaner and much more thought-out than before. Kudos.
Problem is everything else they try to do. See, because the debut was so sweet-sounding,
someone must’ve gotten the idea into their heads that the way to mature as
artists was to do something annoyingly off-key and decidedly “un-sweet” in
nearly every song. The number of string
arrangements that play purposely off-key on this record is too many to count
(they’re not gloppy or overweening; just off-key). Some songs have ridiculous vocal effects,
others have percussion parts that sound like fifth-rate techno drum machines
(“X-Ray Eyes,” I’m looking at you), others have a break or a guitar solo that
just sounds wrong. Some
songs would be decent without the “additions,” but others do three or four of
these things at the same time and just completely suck. “Medicine” is probably the only song, outside
of the first two, that avoids this trap (even “Perfect” has subtle, slightly
off-key string embellishments), but “Airport Song” is just total bullshit all
around, from the treated vocals to the sections that try to “rock hard” but
just blow in their messiness to the fuzzy, “artsy”
percussion that comes in at the end to the fact that the last sound you hear is
a ping-pong ball bouncing between the speakers. Now, guys, if you’re trying to be taken
seriously as artists and not looked at as a bunch of college goofs, using sound
effect segues that make me think of PLAYING
BEER PONG might not be the
best thing to do.
Besides the little annoying touches
that smack of a band trying to be artsy and serious but having no idea
whatsoever how to do so, the other problem with this one, when compared to the
debut, is that, outside of “Great Escape,” there is absolutely no energy whatsoever on display.
Being “mature artists” does not mean you can’t have any fun, guys. These songs just mope along slowly and bore
me. The acoustic guitar work isn’t as
immediately pleasing or interesting. The
token song that adds an electric guitar flourish (“Getting Even”) sounds like a
disinterested rewrite of “Scars and Stitches” from the last record, at least
until the bridge part with the most unlistenably off-key bending-note acoustic
guitar solo in the history of mankind comes in.
By the time “Bury Me” pops up near the end and tries to pick up the
energy, it just seems half-hearted, and the “find the JACKALS!!!!!!!!!!!!”
sudden scream vocal thing (whose fucking idea was that? Horrible!) ruins whatever energy it may have
had anyway. And the
“Parachute”-imitating “big ballad” at the end, “Rocketship,” is horrible. I actually know for a fact
that big Guster fans tend to cite this as one of the band’s best songs, but to
me it’s just ridiculous, cliched, over-reaching bullshit and separates the
diehard fans of this melodic yet generic acoustic college folk-rock malarkey
from people who make fun of everyone in the crowd at a Dave Matthews Band
show. “I’m off on a rocket ship, prepare
for something new! I’m off on a rocket
ship, ecstatic with the view!” That’s
crap. Total crap. And the OFF-KEY STRINGS are a nice touch,
too. You guys know that it’s legal to
add string flourishes that play the correct notes, don’t you? Huh?
And I won’t even mention the bonus track. It makes “Rocketship” sound like “While My
Guitar Gently Weeps.” Don’t listen to
it. Please. I’m begging you.
If I sound harsh, it’s because, when
you look at what they’ve pulled off more recently, you know this isn’t near the best they can do, but I guess it’s not awful. “Great Escape” and “Demons” really are great
songs, “Perfect” is no slouch itself, and the only tunes that completely blow are “Airport Song,” “Rocketship,” and the bonus track. Everything else is actually melodic and
decently-written, as you’d expect from this outfit. It just lacks energy and has lots and lots of
“production flourishes” that sound off-key, annoying, or simply wrong. If Parachute was a college
band comfortable being a college band, Goldfly is a band clearly
not comfortable with just being a college band anymore, but having very real trouble figuring out how to move forward. Still, that’s no excuse for not realizing
that, unless you’re the Beatles, having violins purposely play the wrong notes
is probably not the way to go.
Lost And Gone Forever (1999)
Rating: 8
Best Song: “What You Wish For”
The difference in intent between Goldfly and this one is nearly nonexistent. It’s not some great sonic overhaul that leads
to the stunning and unexpected rise in quality you find here. It’s that the band does everything better. The melodies are crisper and
better-written. The production is full,
layered well, and robust. The flourishes and touches are actually on-key
(always nice). The vocals are excellent, and some of the harmonies between Adam and Ryan here are just superbly
done. How much of this is due to the
band’s suddenly maturing and how much is due to their signing with a major
label, having more than $200 to produce the album, and bringing in hitmaker
Steve Lillywhite to produce, I don’t know.
It’d be stupid to say all of the improvement can be attributed to the
band, but it’d probably be selling the guys short to say everything is
Lillywhite’s doing, because it’s not like he could write these wonderful songs
for them. I’m gonna go ahead and credit
him with a lot of the production, though.
Is that alright? I mean, a lot of
this sounds vaguely like a Dave Mathews Band record, with the only difference
being that it’s actually full of wonderful pop songs.
OK, so, despite my ramblings about
how there’s no real difference between Goldly and this record in
terms of what the band’s trying to do, there is clearly a huge difference in
results. Goldfly was a doofy
college band trying to be a serious pop band but failing, but Lost and Gone Forever is a sugary-sweet (yet lyrically about
vaguely dark and sad topics…not that you can tell) AM pop band through and
through. No more amateur night college
bullshit, and while my head still contains disturbing visions of Abercrombie when
listening, I don’t mind that at all when I agree with the masses in
expensive sandals. Apparently, Brian
still beats every bit of percussion on the album with his hands, but sell me
tickets to a Ryan Cabrera concert and call me the president of the Tom DeLay
fan club if he doesn’t make those bongos and hand-cymbals sound a LOT like a
real drum kit most of the time. Expert
conguero-ing here, yes. And the whole
concept of “two acoustic guitars and a guy on bongos” has pretty much been
totally shot to hell, too. Listening to
this album is like swimming in a sea of soft electric guitars, ON-KEY strings,
barely-there but lovely keyboards, and some of the best vocal harmonies you’ll
hear on a stupid pop record from the late nineties. This is POP MUSIC. This band does not rock, this band is not folky,
and this band is not stupid college bullshit.
It’s straight pop music, by the definition of “catchy melodies with
lovely, clever production and guitars and, you know, REAL INSTRUMENTS” instead
of whatever “pop music” has come to mean nowadays, with boring Swedish people
sitting in towers and writing banal crap set to computerized bleeps
underpinning a 15 year old with breast augmentation girating and giving
perverted, overweight middle-aged men sitting in faceless cubicles and having
mid-life crises boners.
Ofcourse, that means it depends solely on the quality of tuneage for
its reason to exist, and the tunes here are almost uniformly super-tasty. The hits here (at least in Boston, where they
were HUGE back in my senior year of high school) were “Barrel of a Gun” and “Fa
Fa,” and they’re certainly some of the catchiest things released that year, but
there are plenty of others that hold up just as well, if not better, especially
if you’re looking for some delicious, occasionally Beach Boys-level (seriously)
harmony work. The opener “What You Wish
For,” for instance, has some of the prettiest, honey-sweetest vocal harmonies
I’ve ever heard, and the slow “Either Way” is
nearly as good. That violin solo during
the bridge of the latter, by the way? Excellent! See, you can add strings to songs, make them
play the right notes, and it can still be tasteful! Not hard!
And don’t think this album does the predictable nineties thing and
starts mediocre-ing after track 4 or so, nope!
Except for the last ten minutes (which BLOW, but we’ll get there), the
tunes here are so damn impressive it’s hard to believe these guys squelched out
Moldfly so recently. “I Spy” might
actually be the prettiest thing here, and “Happier” provides some breaks that I
might call “rocking” if this band were able rock, at all. “So Long” sort of slowly shuffles by without
calling much attention to itself, but it’s gorgeous nonetheless, and the odd
falsetto intro to “All the Way Up to Heaven” is a disturbingly shitty way to
start a tune, but the vocal layering at the song’s climax is so
flabbergastingly good it completely saves it.
Sure, “Two Points For Honesty” has a ridiculous fluttering intro that
sucks and gets a bit too overdramatic for my tastes, and “Rainy Day” is just a
horrible, overwrought piece of shit all around, but it’s not like these guys
have ever been able to end an album correctly (witness “Rocketship”).
I really like this album. I really, really, really like this album. If it ended with a bang instead of a shit being
taken on my head I would honestly think about a rating even higher than what
I’ve doled out, but considering this is nothing but sugary-sweet pop music by
clean cut white boys, that rating is pretty impressive. If you take my recommendation to heart and go
look these guys up, do not be discouraged by the fact that they’re probably
grouped with John Mayer and Matchbox 20 and other boring white douches that
write generic pop music. I mean, they’ve
opened for John Mayer! What the
fuck!? But take heart! It is possible to write pretty pop music that
does nothing but be pretty pop music, have the guy who produces the Dave
Matthews Band come in and produce, and turn out a really good record. This band has nothing “crazy” or
“interesting” or “out of the ordinary” going for them like an Eddie Vedder on
vocals or a fascination with guitar feedback.
On this record, they do nothing but write pop songs and sing pretty
vocal harmonies, but the songs are so strong and the harmonies are so pretty
and the production is so well-done, full, and unpredictable that it
turns out really, really well. When I
decided to review these guys for the sole reason that my sister liked them a
lot, I had no idea I’d like one of their records as much
as this one, but what are you gonna do?
It’s very strong. I mean, it’s as
good as Interpol or the first Strokes album, for god sakes, and that is very good. High 8! Somehow.
Keep It Together (2003)
Rating: 7
Best Song: “Careful”
The only thing Guster hadn’t tossed out of
its sack of musically-limiting goodies on Lost and Gone Until I Find You Hiding in the Closet Smoking Crack, You
Loser was the whole “conguero”
thing. Brian Rosenworcestershire sauce
was still beating those
Two things make me rate this one
lower than Lost and Gone Forever.
First, although I always used to make fun of them for their schtick, now
that it’s gone, the normalness of this band is disturbing. If not for the fact that they’re good songwriters,
there would be very little to separate them from countless
other shitty bands that Aamer Haleem likes (he’d tell you this himself, but
he’s busy trying to reunite Flock of Seagulls).
Heck, even the harmony work that was occasionally so darn orgasmic on the last album is toned down a bit.
There are no moments where the two singers are belting out completely
different melody lines with totally different lyrics at the same time and having it make perfect sense (something I completely neglected to
describe in the last review…check out “What You Wish For” for it, it’s incredible). They can still layer their
voices wonderfully, but so can lots of people.
Poo. And second (sorry that took like five sentences), the songwriting, while just as
strong on the best numbers, is simply not as consistent. I’d say three songs here reach the tippy-top
highs of the best moments of the last record.
The opener “Diane” is a bit subdued as an album-starter for this band,
but it’s probably the best implementation of a full drum kit the guys break out
here. Check out the subtle
building! Lovely piano! Great little tune, and a fantastic lead-in to
“Careful,” which might be my favorite song these guys have yet done. It’s nearly a perfect pop song. Chimey, jangly, R.E.M.-y guitars (an influence
I actually sense a bunch of here, by the way), nice pseudo-rocking section
after the chorus, and such an incredibly ace melody you’ll be humming the song
for days upon hearing it just once. Nearly as good is “Homecoming King,” with
more jangly guitar work, more of a bombastic buildup and chorus, and the best
line of the album to a biased, provincial Bostonian (“Back in
Massachuuuuuuusetts!!", which, coincidentally, came up at the exact moment I pulled into my driveway in Wellesley, having just completed my six
hour drive back from Long Island for “spring break,” for which I loyally
decided to go farther north because that’s where all my friends are…by the way,
best part about teaching at a private school?
Still having a spring break!).
Anyway, the rest of the record is
about evenly split between good and bad, and although the best of what’s left
is not great, it’s still enjoyable and occasionally as
good as “Barrel of a Gun,” which is kind of an overrated song, if you axe
me. “
Predictably, the band again tries to go “big and meaningful” at the end and fails. “I Hope Tomorrow is Like Today” is mildly OK, but stupid (just look at that title…ick), and “Two at a Time” starts out sounding vaguely like Indian sitar music (no, I’m not kidding) before a big chorus of little kids tries to recreate the atmosphere of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” only with little moron kids instead of gospel singers, and fails in every way imaginable (but the song is STILL eons better than “Rocketship,” which is ASSGRABBLINGLY ATROCIOUS). Still, the best moments here are just fantastic, melodic, sunny, brilliant pop music, and the production, while not as intriguing as that on Lost and Gone Forever, is still full of pianos and strings and horns and keyboards used subtly (for the most part) and is generally layered in a very nice, full, unobtrusive way. The one thing this band needs to do is realize they blow ass at making big, album-closing, profound statements and stop trying to do that, because three straight albums that take a shit at the end is more than enough. Guster is a lovely, sugary-sweet pop band full of melodic chops, but they are not fit to do much more, and someone needs to tell them that.
Guster On Ice: Live From
Portland , Maine
Rating: 8
Best Song: “Careful”
This is another one of those fun CD/DVD packages where I’m only reviewing the CD part, and what makes this one even more retarded is that apparently the tracklist on the DVD is both different and six full tracks longer than the CD part, which could mean any number of things, really. Did they play two shows, stick one on the DVD and the other on CD? Is the CD just 2/3 of the DVD songs but re-ordered for some reason? If so, why would they do that? And why does the crowd noise seem to make the CD seem like it’s in the right order? Could the DVD be the re-jiggered version? That seems a bit silly to you, doesn’t it? I’m brimming with questions here. I guess if you’re a big Guster fan you should just get the whole CD/DVD combo pack extravanganza anyway. You know the DVD has “What You Wish For” on it but the CD doesn’t? I love that song! That sucks! I give this half-assed downloaded-from-illegal-Russian-mp3-site CD package a zero! A pox on thee!
Oh, I’m
sorry, I thought I was talking about the new Mars Volta album for a sentence or
two there. Totally my fault. This here live record’s quite good, actually. Really good!
I wouldn’t say these performances improve immeasurably over the studio
versions or anything, but the boys are surely fun and energetic and oh so nice
and have a lovely rapport with all the teenage girls in the audience. Plus, they’re in
Ah, but there’s the rub. This is Guster! They don’t rock! They play lovely melodic pop for teenage girls and college students! And what we have here is roughly an hour of these charming young men playing all their best (except “What You Wish For,” douche!) for a few thousand of their closest friends (seriously, I bet half these people are at like their fifteenth Guster show. That’s how Guster rolls). And it sounds really damn great. The band’s inherent limitations (such as, you know, a complete inability to rock at all) and the fact that they throw in a few songs I don’t appreciate so much (“Come Downstairs and Say Hello,” which seems to be every Guster fan’s favorite song ever, so I guess that’s fine, but there’s no excuse whatsoever for the inclusion of “Airport Song” from way back on Goldfly) means they can’t hope for anything more than an 8, but that’s a decently high 8 up there, you know? All the hits are here! “Barrel of a Gun” and “Fa Fa” from Lost and Gone Forever, “Careful” (still the perfect Guster song and a nearly perfect pop song, period) and “Amsterdam” from Keep it Together, a bunch of other great stuff from those two, “Demons” and that crap song from Goldfly, and even a superbly-done cover of the Talking Heads’ “(Nothing But) Flowers,” rescued from that crappy late period Heads album with the monkey on the cover. Considering the entire reasoning behind like 70% of Naked was to layer a bunch of bongos on top every song on the album for no reason, considering “(Nothing But) Flowers” was a catchy, silly pop tune, and considering the whole “conguero” shtick Brian RosenWorcester, MA is still toting around, this is pretty much the perfect song for Guster to cover, so it’s no surprise they do a great job with it. I actually think I like it more than the Talking Heads version. Great harmony vocals! And that’s all I have to say about that.
Just enjoyable stuff all around here. “To Ramona” and “Homecoming King” are turning into two of my favorite Guster songs, and I suppose it’s a shame that half of Keep it Together had to blow because, man, those are great songs! Nothing wrong with the Lost and Gone Forever material, either. “Happier” is especially good. Count me as ecstatic that they didn’t play that horrendous “Rocketship” song, too. God, I hate that thing. This is probably my new favorite Guster album, actually, and definitely the best starting place for the band, which sucks because you have to buy it packaged with a DVD for like $25 or something, and if you don’t like it then you just wasted $25! But you WILL like it! It’s layered, catchy, melodic, creatively-written and arranged, organic pop music. Guster is probably the least “challenging” band on the planet, but since when do you always need to be challenged?
Ganging Up On The Sun (2006)
Rating: 7
Best Song: “Manifest
Destiny”
Everyone’s favorite Boston-based happy layered adult guitar-pop band Guster are back, and now, not only are they using a bass player, and not only do they actually employ a full-functioning drum kit on nearly every song, but they’ve gone and added another guy! That dude on the cover of Guster on Ice looking down so you won’t actually see his face is one “Joe Pisapia,” a “multi-instrumentalist” who’s apparently been part of the band’s touring band for forever, but since they choose to only do one new normal band thing per album (add bass on Goldfly, get major label money and producer on Lost and Gone Forever, add actual drums on Keep it Together, release live CD/DVD combo back on live CD/DVD combo pack), they waited until now to officially make him a member of the band. And dude, he totally wrote a song on Keep it Together! The banjo nothing track “Jesus on the Radio!” I didn’t really like that song at all! Let’s move on.
So they’re a four-piece now, just
like every damn normal guitar-pop on the planet. Right.
As long as the songs are still quality, I suppose I could care less, and
thankfully, they are. We’ve got the kind
of slow, moody opening thing like the last album (“Lightning Rod”) and then,
boom! Total opening hit single goodness
that won’t get played on the radio because it’s too damn traditionally normal
(not that Guster gets played on the radio in LA anyway…not that I listen to the
radio any more at all, actually. You
know I’ve lived here since July and I still haven’t preset any of the LA radio
stations?), “Satellite.” Pretty, layered
guitars and keyboards, beautiful harmony vocals, catchy, soaring
melodies...it’s fine stuff, though not as good as the roughly analogous
“Careful” because it lacks a little, I dunno, spark. It’s a bit subdued, you see, which is a problem I see with large chunks of
this otherwise perfectly fine totally normal sunny guitar pop album. As the band gets older and more mature
(christ, they’re over 30 now! When did
that happen? Aren’t they still busking
around
However, they’re still pretty close to the top of the mountain (or, in their case, large hill), so I’m gonna go ahead and rate this album just about even with Keep it Together, despite its lack of anything as ridiculously strong as “Careful” or “Homecoming King.” For one, a bunch of tunes still kick total ass, like the wannabe-epic-sounding high school-reminiscence song “One Man Wrecking Machine” (great line: “I’ll take her to the Christmas dance, maybe now I’ll get in her pants…”), the infectious “C’mon,” and the superb “Manifest Destiny,” which, with its bouncing piano and drunken chorus horn sections, is probably the only time on this album I feel like I’m hearing anything new from this band (And you know what? Fuck what I said earlier. I’d put this one up with Guster’s best). Secondly, there are fewer moments here where Guster totally fucks up and/or takes a giant dump on stage, and the only song I can say I fully dislike is the “rocker” “New Underground,” which sucks for the simple reason that it’s a “rocker” and Guster HAVE NEVER, DO NOT CURRENTLY, AND WILL NEVER “ROCK” without totally blowing. They’re such nice boys! Even grandma likes them! And grandma wouldn’t like a band that detuned their guitars, now, would she? Dammit, this band has a limited bag of tricks! This is why I think their stab at something epic-length, namely the seven-minute “Ruby Falls,” despite being a generally agreeable song, fails to a degree, and why the five-minute mood piece “Empire State” just sucks balls all over the place (OK, again, totally disregard what I said earlier about only “fully disliking” one song, because this one is actually worse and I simply forgot about it…I am a horrible, horrible writer). It’s the happy fun guitar pop tracks I like, you know? Like the ones I’ve already mentioned, along with the fun banjo excursion “The Captain,” which sounds like a more fleshed-out, developed version of what “Jesus on the Radio” was trying to do on the last album, and the lovely closer “Hang On,” which is as hopeful and smiley and pretty as anything they’ve ever done. Also, kudos on finally ending an album successfully with a nice, unpretentious little ditty that plays to their strengths instead of a massive pile of over-reaching idiocy (like they’d done for three consecutive albums before this one). And for the sake of completeness, the other “rocker” (“The Beginning of the End”) and the one in 3/4 time with Adam Gardner singing instead of Ryan Miller (“Dear Valentine”) probably don’t need to exist, but I suppose they’re not embarrassing.
So yes, Guster is still
Guster. They’ve “matured” a little more,
which means their songs are a little more layered and the tempos are a little
more languid, but at this point a Guster album is a Guster album is a Guster
album. You know you’re gonna get a
generally agreeable, sunny guitar-pop time with three or four top-notch tunes,
a couple massive misfires, and a general feeling of “aw, these guys seem
sweet!” when you’re done. They’re a very
safe bet.