Saturday Looks Good To Me - Every Night

General Ratings:

Music: 8
Lyrics: 7
Scope: 6
Consistency: 6

RIYL: Phil Spector, Camera Obscura, Big Star

Further Listening: This is Ivy League, Acid House Kings, God Help the Girl

Siblings: Fred Thomas, Lovesick, Flashpapr, Everyone, City Center

Place of Origin: Ann Arbor, MI

Instrument/Sounds List: Electric and Acoustic Guitars, Bass, Drums, Alternative Percussion (Tambourine, Shaker, Hand Claps, Jingle Bells), Multi-tracked Boy/Girl Vocals, Echo Chamber, Keyboard/Synthesizer, Piano, Organ, Violin, Viola, Cello, Saxophone, Trumpet, Trombone, Glockenspiel, Xylophone, Accordion, Harp, Pedal/Tape Manipulation, Ambient Sounds.

Mood Tones:

Season: Summer
Weather: Sunny
Time of Day: Afternoon

Song Highlights: When the Party Ends, Until the World Stops Spinning, Since You Stole My Heart

Favorite Lyrics:

"We can go to all the places where the money's spent/
And buy whatever new distractions that the suits invent;/
They know the demographics that we represent/
Because they heard all of our secrets through the heating vent,/
So write another song about your discontent/
And wax ecstatic for a time less turbulent/
With metaphors like closet doors that won't open,/
And you can use your list of words that rhyme with 'opulent.'/
Now someone said that you should throw in 'malcontent,'/
Maybe somebody can tell us where the liquor went/
And we can raise our glasses while they raise our rent/
And search for a solution that's more permanent./
But there isn't any doctor or a medicine/
That's gonna make you feel less insignificant;/
Another bunch of words that you can soon forget,/
Another bunch of crooks disguised as gentlemen./
Now you wonder why your notes are always bruised and bent,/
You think that it's your song when it's your instrument;/
You wanna turn invisible and try again,/
I'll kiss you in the kitchen and I'll count to ten." (from "When the Party Ends")

"I smelled summer in those letters/
That you sprayed with your perfume,/
I breathed your breath and was left swaying/
With the curtains in your room,/
In the knowledge you would leave me/
Beneath the angry April moon/
Where you first found me." (from "Dialtone")

"You spent all your money,/
You got brainwashed like before/
And you get so tired of sleeping/
On the filthy kitchen floor./
You think you're something special,/
But the girls know you're a joke,/
With your jacket from the thrift store/
And your little rum and Coke." (from "Until the World Stops Spinning")

Other Thoughts:

Here would be one of the few exceptions to the Avoid-Any-Band-Whose-Name-Is-A-Phrase rule. I want to start by talking about the difference between influence and imitation, as Saturday Looks Good To Me began as an exercise in the latter and, over the course of two albums and countless singles, arrived at the former, much better for the transition. They are certainly not the first band to wear their love of 60s pop and Motown like a badge on a punker's jean jacket, and a quick rummage through their back catalog, which mostly consists of short genre exercizes, can underscore how quaint but unsatisfying purist tribute can be. Fred Thomas, for his part, seems to be a Jack-of-all-genres, having been a primary player in Lovesick (a punk band that more closely resembled the Exploding Hearts than NOFX or Greenday), Flashpapr (a moody post-rock band), the anti-folk records he releases under his own name, and most recently the Arthur Russellesque avant pop of City Center, as well as sitting for spells with His Name is Alive and Ida. One imagines that his record collection has reached T-Bone Burnett-like proportions and that he could talk at length about any LP pulled from it at random. But the great thing about Every Night is that Thomas is finally synthesizing all of his influences and coming up with a pretty savory gumbo. Warn Defever's production is OCD clean and you can hear every little part, which sets this recording apart from all of its predecessors (which bore the kiss of some pretty muddy analog), and the chiming major chords that you expect from a SLGTM record compete with distorted guitar, string quartets, dueling organs; disparate points that all nod in different directions, whose central locus is set firmly in the present.

Speaking of which, this is most certainly a record meant for headphones. You'll notice after close listening that some sounds that are difficult to place at first are actually multiple instruments (sometimes the same type of instrument, distorted or pedal manipulated in one feed, laid cleanly in the other) playing the same part, note for note, precisely recorded and layered (with headphones, the stereo split makes this easier to pick up on). There are a lot of other neat production tricks like looping vocals at the end of choruses to make a slowly diminishing echo, and starting the feed of ambient noise from a live track near the end of the previous cut so that the transition is seamless (to name a few of many).

Anyone who wants to go an extra step can track down the vinyl issue which, while running the same tracklist, includes different takes of almost every song. Some of the differences are minute: Some of the songs that run together in the CD version are remixed to have definite endings to manage the physical reality of track spacings on an LP. There's an extended spoken-word introduction on "Dial Tone," and Thomas subs his own voice in for Betty Marie Barnes' on "Since You Stole My Heart." Perhaps the largest difference can be heard on "When the Party Ends," before an acoustic anthem more akin to Thomas' solo efforts than most of SLGTM's catalog, on vinyl remade as a fuzzed up freak out, providing a re-recording differential that would make Ira Kaplan proud. There are also alternate singles versions of three album cuts ("Until the World Stops Spinning," "The Girl's Distracted" and "Lift Me Up"), all of which are collected on the Sound On Sound compilation. Thomas has gone on the record stating that the LP version's takes were meant to be a bit rawer to appeal to the DIY sensibility of the average LP listener. It's a bit paradoxical, but probably plays to the nihilistic tendencies of most punk rockers that the audio format that's generally agreed to be of the highest quality is most often used to release lo-fi singles by noisy bands. Alas. It probably bears noting that most of the re-recordings are interesting more for the relief they grant to the originals than as stand-alone cuts.

I also want to talk for a second about tracklists and album flow. So far as I can tell, most of the major labels have given up on trying to construct coherent albums out of what are basically collections of singles. They seem to get that the songs you expect to be the biggest charters should be at the front of the record so that nearly everyone who puts it on will hear them, but all other nuance of sequence and sentiment seems to have been lost. I mention this because Every Night (with the possible exception of the late placement of the peppy "Lift Me Up") feels properly sequenced to me, each track flowing well into the next, the album as a whole tracing a pair of arcs, rising as each side begins and falling as it ends. It's easy to miss this at first, as we're far enough into the CD era to have almost come out the other end, and we're well used to thinking about an album as a single, uninterrupted playlist; the jump between "If You Ask" and "Empty Room" in conjunction with the late arrival of LMU, when played from beginning to end on an ipod or CD player effectively obscures the album's shape. But to truly appreciate the main conceit behind SLGTM, I think you have to allow that Thomas is constructing Every Night to play as an LP, a nod to the 60s and 70s classics that are its most obvious influence. It's no coincidence then that IYA, the darkest song on the album, concludes the first side and is followed by the bushy-tailed ER; in contrast, "When You Got to New York," the album's closer, carries a similar downbeat but recasts IYA's sense of foreboding with nostalgia and regret. It's probably pretentious to suggest actually doing this, but one imagines the best way to really "get" this point is to stop the album after IYA for a minute, or however long it would take you to flip an LP over, long enough for ambient noise to cleanse your aural palate.

The Downside:

Unfortunately, the biggest drawback here is Thomas' voice, which is thin to begin with and often pushed past its already-limited boundaries. This flaw is felt doubly for being set in such stark and immediate comparison with the all of the female vocalists, many of whom have strong, conventionally pretty voices. A couple of times the band seems to think it can substitue strong tempos for melodic leads, another mistake that is more persistently notable due to internal comparison. The fine line Thomas walks between throwback and singer-songwriter means that sometimes you get traditional (perhaps cliched) heartsick balladry and sometimes fresh, intelligent wordsmithing. Neither of these is necessarily better than the other given the tone the album intends to strike, but the vacillation back and forth can be off-putting.