02.19.07
The West Coast represents with the album I can’t stop listening to
Let’s get the basics, simple and easy, out of the way right up front, eh? If you like Wilco, The Jayhawks, the Old 97s, and/or Jason and the Scorchers then you will probably like Careless Hearts. If you are a boy rather than a girl, you might like them even more. [Why? Why boy? *lifts eyebrow*—Mimi] If that’s enough of a rec for you, then go buy it already, if you want to read my rambling love letter to the album, then read on, MacDuff. [The Crime Dog?—Mimi]
The self-titled debut CD from Careless Hearts is one of the few albums recently of a new band that has managed to remain on continuous repeat with me for a few weeks (with only a brief break to wallow in the new Lucinda Williams). I’d heard a few songs on their MySpace and liked it well enough. I wasn’t bowled over until I heard the whole album. Like going on a date and thinking that at least it didn’t suck, and then discovering on the second date that you have a real connection to this person that perhaps nervousness or disregard masked on your first meeting. [Sigh.—Mimi]
Careless Hearts is four boys from California. That’s all I know about them. Or, more accurately, they are four boys currently in California, I don’t even know exactly where they’re from. I make the distinction because, besides my father, I haven’t met very many people actually from California. They have a traditional 4-piece rock band set up (lead guitar, rhythm guitar, bass, and drums) and sing some pretty great harmonies. They write some pretty awesome original lyrics.
The album opens with “Chattering Teeth” which has pretty much been stuck in my head constantly for two weeks now. And, you know, not in that irritating way where you want to stab yourself in the ear with a fork to kill the song [Time to renew your medication, dear.—Mimi], but rather as a pleasing soundtrack to the normal thoughts that rattle around in my head all day. This song sounds light-hearted until you listen to the lyrics. It’s full of insomnia, late night loneliness, anxiety, and fear of an unknown future. Which is perhaps why I’ve been singing it in my head on repeat. I really love how listening to this feels like you’re having a good time, as if perhaps you too could transform all your insomniac worries into a toe-tapping bit of rock n’ roll. [This song is great. I also appreciate the dissonance between the pop sound of the music and the darker lyrics.—Mimi]
“Not Going Alone” is the story of a lonely girl in what I can only imagine is a gritty bar. “Looking around this room right now, your chances look alright/And I’m thinking that you won’t be going home alone tonight.” This sets a perfect scene to me, a sort of sad tale of heavy drinking and looking for comfort in the wrong places. Something that plays out in bars all over the country, at every economic level, every night of the week and here it’s summed up in a perfect little rock n’ roll snapshot. You can actually imagine the band singing this song on the tiny stage in the very bar they sing about at anytime in the last 30 years. It’s as strangely comforting as it is sad. [I can’t imagine this band in a bar at all. They sound way too slick and produced. I get a completely different feel from this song than you. I don’t see this as a sad story at all; it’s an upbeat little number about having a good time out but being totally self-aware of why people usually go to bars, which is to hook up. I think our different views on this pretty much wraps up the differences in our out-looks on life, nay, Citizen Rodgers, don’t you?—Mimi] [Hmmm. To me, it's about the power that an attractive woman has, and the willingness of the men around her to accommodate her. All she has to do is choose.—Daisy]
The same theme of drunken bar hook-ups plays through “Old Ways Die Slow,” but this time with added pleas for redemption from God. I think the only thing this song is missing is some heart-ripping steel guitar tearing through it. The simple harmonizing and rock tempo is really lovely here, but it could be taken up a notch on the songs that break your heart scale. Um, though, perhaps I’m the only person who would want something like that. [I really like this song. I think what makes them sound so slick is the vocals. The singer on this sounds like he’s been in bands a long time and has maybe had voice lessons. It’s a good pop-song. It would be good on a soundtrack accompanying a montage.—Mimi]
There’s a darker undercurrent to the music in “Box Step.” Many of the other songs here, while having pretty grim lyrics are lifted with music that carries the joy inherent in rock n’ roll (which has been mutated into the feel-goodness of pop music), but this song is over-all darker and angrier. [It’s the percussion. The percussion gives you a feeling of nervousness. This is a music composition trick. It works well here.—Mimi] The lyrics reflect the feeling: “I’m gonna do me/Some screaming and shouting/I’m gonna call it a song.” There’s weight here which perfectly pulls the whole album down, keeping it from drifting too close to pop music and anchoring the darkness that neatly ties country music to rock music in that wide open genre we call alt country. [I wonder why I find this album walking the parody/wannabe line and you don’t. Maybe it’s my headspace from too much research or maybe I’m just a bitch.—Mimi]
“Can’t Tell a Man” and “Never to Return” showcase the range of the country music spectrum influencing Careless Hearts. The first clearly has sprung, like a green sapling, directly from American roots music. You can almost hear the old Kentucky hills in the rhythm and the lyrics. The second is a story of isolation and tragedy, a very traditional American song theme, though here the sound is updated, relying more on the last two decades of alternative rock music than it does on the beginning of the last century. [I’ve decided it’s the vocals that are leaving me sort of ambivalent here. The song construction is fantastic, the sound is something I really adore, but their voices sound very young and clear; there’s no grit here. I suppose that’s true of Rhett Miller, too, though. Maybe it needs to grow on me.—Mimi]
I’m a complete sucker for song imagery about being out in the country somewhere under the open sky, the bright stars and preferably in a field or something. “Ravenous” brings not only this but the intimate details of having her daddy’s Army blanket and clutching at each other in the sight of the vastness of the world. Musically this song is another anchor, like “Box Step” and “Never to Return,” slowing down the more upbeat country/rock feel of this album.
The thing I love most about art, all art, visual, literary, musical, is its ability to completely transport you to another time, another place, another life. Music most often does that, for me, with the actual sound, the instruments, the arrangement, etc., and with lyrics secondarily, in the stories they tell. “22 Filmore” puts me exactly in San Francisco, in an apartment somewhere on 16th or 17th in the Mission, in a relationship with a man I’ve never met, but somehow I’m deeply in the total domestic intimacy of it all. [Probably the best song on the album. It’s a very sweet love song. If you like that kind of thing. The lines about lighting the cigarette are very nice. Lovely song.—Mimi]
“Personal Picasso” closes out the album, with a delicious combined sense of longing and the desire for the other person to just fuck off. [O rly? I know I was pissing you off when you were writing this, but my desktop had gone SIDEWAYS and I couldn’t Google shit and it was making me insane. Insane in a way I normally am not.—Mimi] [Since we aren't dating, and thus I haven't broken up with you, I'm not sure why you're reading the desire for an ex to fuck off as directed at you? Whose issues are we playing with here?—Cricket] It plays as a very nice answer to the penultimate “In the Dark” in which the author longs to still be in the dark and lies, because knowing the truth is more painful. Overall there’s a story threaded through the entire album, I find, simply one of true love, of love lost, having been done wrong, and finding yourself at the dark bottom that you have to come up from. Exactly the story this kind of perfect, uncomplicated country/rock should tell.
Also a little shout to the cover art, which I completely love. I found myself staring at it for like ten minutes like is was a Where’s Waldo puzzle for the terminally hip. [I sound more negative than I mean to about this record. It’s very good. You’ll probably love it.—Mimi]
The album is available on iTunes and at our beloved CDBaby, and of course they have the obligatory MySpace page. Check them out, you won’t be sorry, and if you are, well, you only have yourself to blame. And me for recommending them, but I’m not offering any reparations, beyond perhaps forcing you to listen to them until you do like them, so you might want to rethink complaining to me. [Where are my reparations for Lucinda Williams? Please mail my talking dolphin FedEx not UPS.—Mimi]
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