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June 6th, 2006 by A. A. Davidson (Permalink)
Label: Lookout! Year: 2002 Add Comments |
I’ll never begin a Pretty Girls tirade without mentioning that Jay Clark’s playing on their debut, Good Health changed the way I thought about the guitar. But it seems like I’ll never discuss Pretty Girls without beginning a tirade.
Good Health didn’t let up. The album was all voltage: replay-able, loud, and to the point, the point being that some chick was screaming “sad girls for life!” while a band of spot-on-the-money boys played like they were racing gas prices. Every track was the best track.
Is the third album, Elan Vital that bad? Is it unfocused like the second album, The New Romance? My own malaise should probably disqualify from saying so, but this is the aughts, baby, and everybody with a blog and the new Pearl Jam CD gets on the scale to weigh in. I listened to Elan a few times—just like I did with Romance—and all I hear are out-of-the-box Casio sounds and a band discovering that their producer has—gasp!—an unusual instrument collection that no one knows how to use. Just because it’s there doesn’t mean you know how to play it. With the exception of Wilco, who didn’t learn that in grade school?
Like Romance, Vital treks away from the diamond edged post-punk of Good Health. Vital is 12 one-trick ponies lit up by the cheapest fireworks on the block. Seriously, the track “Pearls on a Plate” actually samples stupid, anti-poignant bottle rockets. Is that Drew Barrymore’s boyfriend before he was Drew Barrymore’s boyfriend playing drums? What’s going on?
It’s certainly not the fault of their contemporaries. At this point, PGMG is so expatriated from their perfect debut that their Washington State comrades—Blood Brothers, Minus The Bear, Sleater Kinney—have moved in so many right directions that they probably renamed the grossest slop in Seattle’s coolest cafeteria “Elan Vital.”
If I sound harsh, that’s probably because I’m wearing my homemade “Do you remember what the music meant?” shirt—and because I hate the past, especially when I have to watch something I love become less and less relevant to its creators. I still want to frame every moment of Good Health, and I’m not going to let one more Vital second distract me from that goal.
If you want to beg the band to play “If You Hate Your Friends, You’re Not Alone”, go see them on tour.
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