Portastatic with Ken Vandermark and Tim Mulvenna - The Perfect Little Door EP
(Merge)
Maybe Mac McCaughan didn't want you to know he has actually become something of a jazzbo. Sure he's incorporated some of those elements into some of his pop albums, like the instrumentation of Portastatic's The Nature of Sap from 1997 or the Jim O'Rourke led flourishes of Superchunk's Come Pick Me Up from 1999, however, he's seemed reluctant to make such things a permanent portion of his songwriting. He even has his own free jazz label now, Wobbly Rail, but you'll find no mention of Merge in the Wobbly Rail world or vice versa. In his mind, he has the jazz he loves and the pop he knows how to write (and still kinda loves), and never the twain shall meet.
Hopefully with this EP, A Perfect Little Door, the worlds will collide, as it is clearly McCaughan's best release of the year (beating his soundtrack Looking for Leonard and his fulltime band's latest Here's to Shutting Up). These songs stem from an invitation for McCaughan to perform in the 2001 Noise Pop Festival in Chicago, to do a duet with tenor saxophonist and clarinetist Ken Vandermark. Unsure of his capabilities at improvisation, McCaughan instead decided to work off of previous compositions for the performance, letting Vandermark and percussionist Tim Mulvena expand on them.
Only one of these songs, "When You Crashed," is an actual live performance from the Festival; the rest were recorded the following day in a studio. "When You Crashed," from 1995's Slow Note for a Sinking Ship, is given a three minute long intro by Vandermark with his saxophone. This intro does little to lead into the ominous tone of the song; it acts more as a showcase for Vandermark's skills. However, when the song begins to develop later, as McCaughan's lyrics begin to explain the funeral and center on him questioning whether anyone deserves such an unfortunate fate, the merger of Vandermark's sax and McCaughan's simple, pure pop song does wonders, accenting the conflict within McCaughan and putting an exclamation point at the end of his revelation.
Only one entirely new song appears on the album, "Hey Salty," the framework of which was written by McCaughan specifically for the Festival and this release. Unfortunately, it turns out to be the weakest song lyrically and musically. The song is upbeat and simple, asking whether McCaughan wants to move to the Gulf Coast to live with a new love. There's little room in the song for Vandermark or Mulvena to make much of an impact here; all we get are a couple atmospheric tones. The trio does much better expanding on the existing songs.
One of these four older songs is not actually a Portastatic composition but rather a Vandermark composition, "Late Night Wait Around" from Burn the Incline. Here we get the same process exhibited in the other songs only in reverse; McCaughan is able to take Vandermark's framework and make it more like something he is used to creating--a pop song.
A repetitive guitar is combined with a complimentary bassline, and the lyrics are expanded to fit a more pop structure with obvious choruses.
Perhaps the success of this EP--textured, colorful, beautiful, and potent--will help break down those boundaries between McCaughan's pop and his secret life as a jazz fan, leading to new terrain in McCaughan's songwriting. As Superchunk takes a new direction on Here's to Shutting Up, that new sound is more of a continuance or an iteration than it is something exciting or new--turning uppity, young pop punk into mellow adult contemporary pop. If McCaughan and Superchunk were instead to build off of these songs, adding more jazz elements to their longstanding reputation for pop brilliance, it would likely give McCaughan's songwriting new breath instead of a last, pretty gasp.
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