(My 100 favorite albums in chronological order: #80 – released March 22, 2004)
Track listing: Slender / It’s A Girl’s World / North / Second Rate Republic (Demo) / Wedding Song / Swing Low Stuart / Ballad Of The Bootboys / Them Vs. Us / The Sadness Of Things / My Perfect Girlfriend (Demo) / My Life As A Car Crash / Give Me A Riot In The Summertime
In Spring 2003, I became a staff writer for indie music website Splendid!, which differentiated itself from Pitchfork, PopMatters, etc. by vowing to review anything submitted to it. I was required to write three reviews every week: one in the 300-500 word range of an album I liked, and two 150-200 word capsules about albums I didn’t necessarily have to like. Every couple weeks, I’d receive a box of fifteen or so CDs, some with press releases, others with handwritten requests from the editor to review them right away. And, I had to write about every last one.
Occasionally, I’d encounter a disc from an artist I’d actually heard of (Arab Strap, Sufjan Stevens, Beth Orton) but a majority of what I got was previously unknown to me. Over the next eighteen months, I was exposed to everything from Native American folk music to masturbatory prog rock, much of it relentlessly mediocre or just plain awful (such as a band named “Shugaazer” that had fuck all to do with My Bloody Valentine.) Most weeks, I’d strain to find a disc that I “liked” enough for the required lengthier review. However, once in a great while, something exceptional surfaced. For instance, I heard TV On The Radio before practically any other non-critic via their debut EP Young Liars. It remains in my regular listening rotation to this day, along with albums from other Splendid! discoveries like Swedish pop star Marit Bergman, winsome Aussie folk-rocker Tamas Wells, and American singer-songwriter turned film scorer Paul Brill.
Apart from Seven Swans, my all-time favorite Splendid! find was UK-based band Tompaulin. Arriving in my mailbox in March 2004, Everything Was Beautiful And Nothing Hurt compiled tracks from all of their singles to date. Named after a Northern Irish poet and having borrowed their album title from Kurt Vonnegut, I anticipated a strong literary bent to their sound (their first studio album, 2001’s The Town and The City (itself named after Jack Kerouac’s first novel) has tracks called “Richard Brautigan” and “All The Great Writers and Me”) but I had no other expectations. Nearly a year into my Splendid! tenure, I’d learned to be open to hearing anything on one of these discs submitted for review in terms of genre, sound, tone and quality (especially quality.)
EWBANH’s opener, “Slender”, commences with a soft hum of atmospheric sound, soon joined by a trembling, almost tentative guitar strum. Vocalist/lyricist Jamie Holman then sings, “All that I remember / is your wrists / and they were slender,” his delivery slightly-but-not-overbearingly-fey with a noticeable Lancashire accent. An electric guitar plays a countermelody, and a softly thumping drumbeat enters at the second verse. The song’s title cleverly shifts as Holman sings, “By Monday morning, I won’t even remember / your chances are slender.” All the while, the song has only two chords, which repeat measure by measure.
At the third verse, female vocalist Stacey McKenna takes over from Holman. The sudden switch to her voice, pitched somewhere between Belle and Sebastian’s Sarah Martin and Neko Case, is striking. She answers Holman’s words, eventually concluding, “My chances are slender.” The music, continually building momentum from the start, keeps growing fuller and louder until, at 2:35, crunching, majestic electric guitar chords enter the right channel like a beacon of blinding light. McKenna returns, a few bars later, with the climactic lyrics, “And now you won’t hear me / won’t speak and won’t come near me,” sung over and over. It’s thrilling, it’s heartbreaking, it’s everything I could ever want from a pop song, up until it concludes on a final, tranquil grace note.
“Slender” is an ideal introduction to Tompaulin’s tiny, contained oeuvre—for sure, their greatest moment, but far from their only great one. The next two songs reinforce that this is a band worth your time and attention. “It’s A Girl’s World” weds confectionary pop full of strummed acoustics and twinkling keyboards with incisive, wry lyrics, rhyming “Walkman beat” with Exile On Main Street and dropping observations like, “She’s a fat girl / but she’d give you the world / in her ginger curls.” Similarly inclined phrases at the very opening of “North” cascade by in such a breathless, near-euphoric rush that they provide neat contrast to the chorus: a series of descending, clipped phrases (“Oh / when you go down / to the center of town / stay down”), followed by a steady string of trumpet-enhanced ba-da-da-da’s.
But remember, EWBANH is a singles comp rather than a greatest hits album, which means B-sides make up roughly half the selections here. True to form, some are demos, like a pretty but far-from-essential first take on The Town and The City’s closer, “Second Rate Republic”, or “My Perfect Girlfriend”, a deliberate goof which sounds like it was recorded in a cigar box and consists solely of McKenna singing “Debbie, Debbie Harry, Debbie Harry” repeatedly over rudimentary if punchy new wave guitar-bass-drums. There’s also pleasantly wispy stuff like “Wedding Song”, which dutifully emulates “Cemetery Gates”-era Smiths, and “Them vs. Us”, which does the same for late ‘80s Sarah Records twee pop.
Still, just because it’s a B-side doesn’t necessarily make it a castoff or a throwaway, as Pet Shop Boys and Saint Etienne have proven with numerous, above-average B-side compilations of their own. “The Sadness of Things”, for instance, could’ve comfortably fit on The Town and The City with its quotable lines (“She says she likes The Rolling Stones / but she’s only got the Greatest Hits”) and cozy, if melancholy allure. Conversely, “Swing Low Stuart” is a B-side for another reason. Over a sing-song melody, McKenna tartly notes, “Stuart’s the epitome / of white boy, middle class monogamy; / He’d like to know some deviants / he invested in some leather pants,” (one could only hope she’s singing about Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch.) Sounding as agreeable as early Black Box Recorder, it takes a left turn halfway through as guitar feedback slowly creeps in, wave by wave until it consumes all else and you’re left with a cacophony of nearly Metal Machine Music-like proportions.
However, such experimentation is a diversion rather than the norm with this group. Given their unaffected vocals, slice-of-life lyrics and propensity for using two or three chords at most, they most often resemble a punk band, albeit one curiously beholden to pastoral and chamber-pop arrangements. One discerns such tension in this comp’s final two tracks, both of them highlights. “My Life As A Car Crash” is almost ridiculously simple: it expertly shifts back and forth between wordy, subdued verses and wordless, caffeinated five-alarm choruses while keeping both parts urgent-sounding and razor sharp. Holman, meanwhile, expands on the title metaphor’s subtleties without ever mentioning it by name. Closing track “Give Me A Riot In the Summertime” neatly bookends “Slender”, gradually barreling across the volume spectrum from soft to loud; its minor key but ultimately rousing protest pop made immortal by a McKenna verse as impassioned, triumphant and fun as the best of Sleater-Kinney or one of The B-52s’ classic Kate-and-Cindy showcases.
Tompaulin would release one more studio album, 2005’s downbeat but pretty Into The Black before breaking up two years later. Given their perpetual obscurity, you can’t blame them for not carrying forward, but as I wrote about The Go-Betweens many entries ago, you also can’t blame the world for not knowing about them. Had it not been for Splendid!, I doubt I would’ve ever crossed paths with this music, and therein lies a predicament of the internet age. In the past few decades, music production and dissemination has skyrocketed to point where so much more is destined to fall through the cracks or remain obscure than previous.
My time at Splendid! encouraged me to keep one eye on those infinitesimal few musicians who manage to break through all the clutter and the other eye always open for those unknown quantities like Tompaulin, forever patiently awaiting discovery. The challenge is mustering up time and effort to sift through it all to get to those ultra-hidden gems, and I admit that it’s easier said than done—after less than eighteen months, I quit Splendid!, altogether burned out on finding new things to say about albums that were mostly mediocre-to-bad, week after week. The website itself folded a little over a year later, suggesting that its inclusive approach to music criticism sadly wasn’t a sustainable pursuit. Thankfully, with YouTube and a bevy of streaming services, we now have seemingly boundless means to get lost in rabbit holes, forever making our very own discoveries.
Up next: Singing Softly To Me.
“Slender”:
“My Life As A Car Crash”:
Haunted Jukebox 