Call and Response - s/t
(Kindercore)
Straight from the future comes two great new retro
pop bands that borrow heavily from separate eras of past pop music.
One manages to sound futuristic despite being of the same style
of futuristic music made 20 years ago. The other manages
to sound current despite being of the same style of music
made 30 to 40 years ago.
The futuristic band is Ladytron, and they've got everything
a band needs in order to be hip and happening: a
great name, a disinterested Eurotrash vibe,
a style of music nobody's touched in a few years, and
enough decent hooks to fill the memory of a room full
of TRS-80s. That style of music is synthesizer-heavy
early 80s new wave, somewhere between Kraftwerk and Howard
Jones, with a dance-able disco beat. Unlike Moroder's futuristic
disco, though, Ladytron's music is anything but skeletal,
with washes of synth covering the background of almost every
second of the band's first album, 604.
Much of the album is made up of trim three minute pop songs
with dual female vocals, one young and high-pitched and the
other more heavily accented and monotonous and usually spoken.
Songs sung by Helen Marnie, the younger sounding one, are
more pop like "Playgirl" which uses heavenly fluctuating
high-pitched tones with a pogoing bass and chirping beat
and "The Way That I Found You" which has an unforgiving
disco bassline and flourishes of violin-sounding synth
with lyrics about finding a significant-other "drunk watching
the women's tennis." Songs sung/spoken by Mira Aroya are slightly
more experimental, like "Paco!" where Aroya acts like a
department store elevator attendant listing out the store's
directory and "Commodore Rock" which is an aural minefield
of grumbling basslines and pounding beats.
While Ladytron chooses a music from an era of the past that makes
them sound futuristic, Santa Barbara's Call and Response chooses an era that makes
them sound current, latching on to the continuing trend of
Californian, Brian Wilson-inspired pop music. While
these two styles of music are very different, the two bands have
some similarities in sound, both being led by multiple female vocalists
and both coming from the Stereolab school of analog sound using moogs, organs,
and synthesizers, creating plenty of interesting sounds inside
their bouncy pop melodies.
Call and Response's debut album is very reminiscent of the work
of The Ladybug Transistor, sounding like a new millennium version
of The Mamas and the Papas. However, whereas The Ladybug Transistor
seems equally influenced by 70s psychedelic rock like Pink Floyd
as they are by California breeze, Call and Response is all breeze.
In fact, it is an even lighter, airier, whispier breeze, as if the band
took as a secondary influence another popular (but unlikely to be
referenced) breezy 70s California pop group, The Brady Bunch.
The band uses cute, adolescent imagery like "Blowin' Bubbles"
and "Rollerskates" to create vocal pop that wouldn't sound out of
place beside "It's a Sunshine Day" or "Keep On (Movin')."
That is not to discount Call and Response though, because, unlike
the Brady Bunch, all four singers (three female and one male with
guest vocals from Bill Doss of Olivia Tremor Control and Kevin
Barnes of Of Montreal) are strong, and the songs are very well-crafted,
well orchestrated with all sorts of organ, synthesizers, vibes, farfisa,
etc. Their melodies are just so care-free and catchy, it makes me want to do
the Brady Bunch point-with-my-thumbs dance each time I listen to it.
While Call and Response vary their sound a bit over the album,
from the country dreamscape of "California Floating in Space"
to the sassy funk of "I Know You Want Me," most of their songs basically
have the same construction, all at a slow to medium tempo with
strong vocal hooks in the chorus or break-down section.
"Rollerskate" starts off with a keyboard melody and dual female vocals,
the lower, more mellow voice taking lead and the higher voice adding "wa-ho-ho"s,
but, as the guitar becomes the lead instrument, the higher voiced
singer takes over and sings the hook, "Loop-di-loop around the rink
let's go I go." "Map" starts off with keyboard counter-melodies and
rhythm guitar as the male singer takes lead. The vocal hooks come
in when a female singer joins for a duet of Stereolab-ish ba-bas
and a Call-and-Response section of "I'm moving on"-"He's moving
on."
There's nothing new musically in either of these two albums, but
both are filled with fun, well-done pop songs. Artists continue
to look to the past for what will happen in the future, but with
songs as good as these, it's allowable. Perhaps in the
future, people will look towards the future for what will happen
in the future, just like they did in the past, but for now we
can just enjoy living in the past as we prepare for the future.
What time is it, anyway?
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