1) It appears some reunion shows are in the offing. I’m excited, and you should be too. Check their band page on Facebook next week for details, or check back here.

2) It’s been impressively wintry here in DC, and this album is a bit of an antidote for that. It’s not a summer album in the sense that it’s about summer in any direct way, despite the beach photograph on the cover and surfish imagery and guitar work throughout. It’s more that it’s evocative of summers gone by, of looking back with a dose of sadness at being unable to recapture a past that may not have been as great as we remember it. That’s how I experience the album anyway.

Hope you enjoy:

“Ride the Nuclear Wave” - Look into the belly of sharks, past their teeth, to hear the wisdom of the fish inside. Wisdom can be found in unexpected places, after all.

“The Mountain” - Defiance against all odds. Come on, you can’t possibly deny a pop song that samples Winston Churchill.¹

“Drug City” - Nobody’s ever the same… after the long walk home.

“Atmosphere” - Staring at clouds seemed like a good idea when we were younger. Made us think we could fly.

But there was something objectively important about that period that I tend to lose in the clouds of my sentiment: the music was very good. The upcoming reunion of the Slow Jets—one of the best pop bands to come out of Charm City—got me feeling archeological. I’ve spent the past two weeks listening to almost nothing but my old friends from that period. It all holds up pretty well—and I daresay that the Slow Jets have aged best of all.

I remember at some point in early-to-mid 1999, my bandmate Hank Baker and I were driving across downtown with this new pal of ours Greg Preston, having just left Mum’s, where we had probably attempted to cure what ailed us from the night before. Greg reached into his pocket and produced a tape he had recently recorded with some of his friends.

Greg had studied music in college and had transplanted to Baltimore a few years before us. He had been in an early version of Roads to Space Travel, the band that for the first part of my Baltimore experience always seemed to be on the verge of breaking bigger. Roads, lamentably, was in the process of folding, and Greg had started playing with two of the remaining members: Roman and Tim, and a third friend of theirs from years ago, Rick.

Hank was immediately enthusiastic. I, always a little slow on the uptake, was intrigued but not necessarily floored. It sounded like jangly, angular pop—catchy enough, I thought to myself. But within a week, I literally couldn’t stop listening.

Consider “Treetops”:

Listen to the winding guitar intro which simultaneously evolves and explodes into a completely different melody; the amazing fractured guitar “solo” at around second 58; the absurdist yet nevertheless affectingly melancholy lyrics; the way the song seems to barely hang together, yet actually fits together beautifully.

Or “New Sour”:

For a track that clocks in under 3 minutes, it has more abrupt changes than would seem tolerable for a catchy pop song—yet they pull it off! Take note of Tim Baier’s dramatic, plaintive bass lead in and the subsequent staccato breakdown; the way that the different parts of the song seem to almost step on each other; how Roman Kuebler’s drum rolls start at strange times yet end up exactly where you expect them to, in effect outsmarting you.

Or “Run The Company”, Rick Ivy’s lyrically-driven plea for authenticity:

Or “Swan’s Way”, Greg’s shower ruminations on love and longing:

I remember seeing an early Slow Jets show one afternoon at Greg’s house in Hampden. The band set up in the living room, and we all stood around among the busted couches, eating grilled meat and drinking beer cans as this incredibly competent group of musicians ripped through their strange, off-kilter record as the sun went down. It felt like some kind of high-water mark.

A few months later, Roman had left the band to front the Oranges Band, and the Jets brought on one of the several world-class drum talents that seemed to be hanging around Baltimore at the time: the oft-bearded pummeller Marc Berrong. The resulting two albums’ worth of songs were more mature, somewhat longer, more polished and layered, perhaps a bit more straightforward, but no less compelling.

For your pleasure and approval, the anthemic “Margaret Square”:

Or the harried “Heartbreak for Socialites”:

Or the envelope-filtered yet hard-charging “Make it Sound”:

It’s remarkable how relevant and fresh these songs still sound today.

Baltimore as a music scene has blown wide open since I’ve left it. I’m pleased to see that it’s finally getting the national attention it’s deserved since at least the mid-1990s. However, the bits and pieces of the music I’ve heard which have brought my erstwhile city this level of national attention have nothing to do with what I found compelling while I was there. Dan Deacon’s collective and its various offshoots seem much more concerned with innovating for the sake of innovating than writing catchy music for the listener to enjoy.

I’m so very pleased that my friends have decided to give it another go.

My friend Hank has since been telling me to give the band more of a listen. I’ve owned the album for a few months now, but I never really found it too compelling. It might be that my judgment was being clouded by the band’s heritage. Two of the members of FotL are from Mclusky, a band that no shortage of friends had told me, as a Jesus Lizard fan, I absolutely must get into.

Well, I tried, and I couldn’t really understand the comparison. Mclusky was brutish and heavy, math rock for the sake of math rock, with unpleasant metal influences throughout. The Jesus Lizard, for all their cacophony, are only incidentally mathy and complicated—inventive musicians making aggressive, somewhat demented music with a subtle sense of humor permeating their whole oeuvre. Mclusky is like a pile driver to Jesus Lizard’s scalpel.

It turns out Future of the Left is a different kettle of fish. Though not beyond delivering a knuckledragger every so often, they’ve set out to to fuse the best of 90s noise rock with a melodic new wave sensibility. And largely they’ve succeed swimmingly. Look no further for the epitome of their project than I Am Civil Service:

Shellac meets Franz Ferdinand. Or better put, pure Shellac with a melodic Franz Ferdinand bridge, except it’s a bridge to nowhere. Civil Service is a punishing one-part song with several subtle, excellent permutations. The trick starting at 1:36, where the bass switches from the guitar’s syncopated rhythm to a repeated note, switching the note with every repetition, is a classic Bob Weston technique. The finale could end A Minute.

Consider me converted.

EDIT: What timing!

I first came across the man’s work through a band called The Oblivians sometime in early 1995. The Oblivians were possibly one of the crudest, most primitive bands I’d ever seen or heard. They sounded like the Ramones, but with a solid appreciation of the blues undergirding their rock. “Bad Man”, off of Popular Favorites is exemplary of the Oblivians’ talent. Cutting through the fuzzed-out four chord progression is a plaintive drunkard’s lament: “I’m a bad man… but I’m too good for you…” The Reigning Sound will still bust out this gem at shows.

Turns out, the Oblivians were primitive largely on purpose. Some research revealed that Cartwright had fronted a lo-fi Memphis blues band with fellow Oblivian Jack Yarber in the early 90s called The Compulsive Gamblers. Less clobbering than the Oblivians, the Gamblers were by no means a sophisticated band. Their first album, Gambling Days Are Over, was on steady repeat for months for me when I discovered it.

After the Oblivians broke up, the Gamblers reformed to make two more albums, Bluff City and Crystal Gazing, Luck Amazing. My band had the great fortune to open for them in Baltimore probably around 1999. Cartwright’s songs on the second half of Bluff City were already veering into more bitter country-inflected terrain which he would explore in some detail with the Reigning Sound’s first album.

Go out of your way to see any Greg Cartwright performance you may come across. You will be richly rewarded.

On the way there, my bus got stuck in the most impenetrable traffic jam for about three hours, during which time I became intimately acquainted with The Clean’s Anthology album. It’s a pop masterpiece, this greatest hits comp, and I’ve been highly recommending it to just about anyone within earshot.

It was extra disappointing, therefore, to find the reunited Clean barely able to play their old material. A friend was explaining to me that their muddling incompetence was a testament to their honesty, a tribute to their humble roots as a muddling punk band. Hogwash, sez I. Those early songs aren’t nearly as amateurish as all that. “Tight as a duck’s ass”¹ springs more readily to mind than “sloppy”.

Yet the show was somehow thrilling despite the slop. It must be the time travel aspect of it: I probably spent most of the show imagining what it must’ve been like to be hearing these songs in 1978. And though David Kilgour seemed rather sour, his brother Hamish, he formerly of Bailter Space, and Robert Scott of The Bats, seemed to be having a grand old time.

In conclusion, go buy Anthology and revel in gems such as these:

And if you go see The Clean live, be sure to keep the original versions firmly in mind. That way you too can pretend you’re listening to a young group of pop geniuses rather than three aging men not even trying very hard to relive the glory of their youth.

As for Kilgour’s solo stuff, I’ve just downloaded A Feather In The Engine and am quite enjoying it. If he’s playing anywhere near you, go spend the $10 and see the show. You won’t be disappointed.

Here’s a taste:

Photo by the_photographer used under the Creative Commons license.