Hit the Waves –
The Mary Onettes
The first notes of the new Mary Onettes album arrive without
lyrics. The music is not unlike the
ambience music in the hallways of a dimly lit, glowing public aquarium. And indeed, when we emerge from instrumental track
1 “Intro,” we arrive, squinting, at a bright new marine biotype: the beach.
Which is where we shall remain for the remainder of this, to-date,
weirdest album of 2013.
The Onettes are a central bulb in the Labrador record label
chandelier, and their previous album Islands
did a pretty good job of living up to Labrador’s mission of gathering and
fermenting the best indie pop music in Scandinavia. The highlight of Islands was “Puzzles,” which delivered a somewhat risky,
irony-free, wide screen pop song unlike much of anything tried since the
80s. “Puzzles” was a pocket miracle, and
it alone was enough to make the prospect of a theoretically older, wiser band committed
to the same type of Indie Blockbuster totally and completely intriguing when
they stepped to the plate again this Spring.
And so now the Mary Onettes and their Good Ship Earnestness
find themselves beached somewhere in a tropical locale, with pop melodies
intact and a studio full of techniques culled from—wait for it—the 1980s. The leanings of the first true song, “Evil
Coast,” are decidedly sinister, and here we are: lush, sunny melodies from a musically naïve
bygone era, freshly re-minted for 2013, and menacing lines like, “Either we run
or we keep it caged / Who could know something was lost on the evil coast.”
This tempest of earnest-yet-fearsome, lush-yet-earnest
melody, replete with era-appropriate instruments and nonstop references to oceania,
has blown the Mary Onettes into the middle of a Bermuda’s Triangle of bygone
Hot and Steamy Pop Music, vectored between the outrageous coordinates of Duran
Duran, Billy Ocean, and the original Miami Vice soundtrack.
The results should never, ever succeed. This is ridiculous territory, improbable and
gaudy as a flamingo. And yet succeed the
album absolutely does. Unless the
Onettes are at Kaufman-level depth when it comes to being In On the Joke, they
approach this entire project with true belief, which is even more remarkable
for the fact that music and imagery like this wasn’t conceived as believable
the first time it went around, 30 years ago.
That belief has created actual legitimate and improbable indie pop songs
now, seven years after the Miami Vice
remake movie.
(For the record, there are worse ways to hit the beach. Fully-coiffed, serious, and
pastel-suited/loafered is decidedly preferable to drunk, bald and barefoot [i.e.
“the Chesney”] or stoned, balding and bandana-ed [i.e. “the Buffett.”] Which is why Simon Le Bon is still basically
the most awesome person ever, and the other two hucksters are always hiding
their scalps.)
By title track 3 we are sitting shotgun, possibly holding a
shotgun, in Don Johnson’s Ferrari with a bassline straight out of Bananarama
Nation. It is impossible not to search
for smirks in lyrics like, “I’m not gonna break if you let me stay inside your
beating chest” while the music sounds like tanning lotion, two-pieces and drug
crimes.
What the hell is happening here? They named the album after this song! It is, in fact, the flagship Mary Onettes song
of 2013, and it bleeds turquoise. And
yet here is the Shy Indie Boy launching head-bobs and uh-huh’s from beneath the
headphones. In two short months, car
windows are going to be down across the northern hemisphere, and if there is
any justice for melody, this fucking song is going to be pouring forth from at
least a few of them.
“I will meet you in the waves,” indeed.
The groove mellows by track 4 “Years,” but the echo effects
are full-go and the synths are entirely engaged. It is at roughly this point that the listener
realizes, like a shipwreck survivor on the Skeleton Coast, that there is no
getting out of here alive. To wit: “Never let those thoughts operate in your
heart,” and “Don’t let your troubles become someone else’s gold / Like the soul
you hardly know.” The synths and the
shimmering melodies (complete with ominous references to Sins) just keep
crashing into shore through tracks 5, 6, 7.
At some point this becomes both cloying and potentially sleep-inducing,
and it starts to smell like dead sea life in the afternoon sun. But then the wind shifts.
Track 8, “Can’t Stop the Aching,” breaks the spell of sunny
monotony with the marvel of what is essentially a Cure song from a forgotten
corner of Kiss Me, Kiss me, Kiss me. It is close enough to a Cure song, in fact,
that the curlicues of the lead guitar line and the touches of chimes in the
background all but superimpose the image of Robert Smith and his third-again
height of late-80s hair on this most sun-dappled of coasts. Were it not so derivative, this would be the
clear winner of Album Highlight. Alas,
it must suffice as Brilliant Homage:
Just Like Robert.
Just in case you went nine tracks without grasping the idea behind
the album, or the Mary Onettes’ devotion to the idea behind the album, the
final track includes a reference to waves, a hint of Peter Cetera, and the
mallet-to-forehead title, “This is How It All Ends.” In this remote, unpopulated corner of the
2013 indie map, there may be dragons, but there is no irony.
Hit the Waves,
however, is not a concept album so much as a snapshot album. There is no narrative: rather, an umpteen-megapixel portrait of a
beautiful-yet-treacherous resort space inside all of us. The listener is going to giggle and smile,
but it is impossible to discern whether the band were smiling when they made
this thing, because their devotion to the clarity of image, and reality of
menace, is so utterly convincing.
It is difficult enough to sell emotional unrest in pop
music, let alone emotional unrest on a tropical beach. Is there, in fact, a joke in here
somewhere? Were the resultant album not
such a gleaming, impenetrable monolith of melody and conviction, cruel laughter
could be forgiven. Hit the Waves, however, is white sand in the eyes of Thom Yorke and
any other indie artist too paralyzed by archetype-resistance to write a
hook.
The Mary Onettes believe in melody, and such wanton devotion
makes an entire album worth of indie-label beach songs either colossally
awesome or colossally indulgent and idiotic.
Probably both.
Keepers: 1-10
April 2013
