Volume 3 – She & Him
A sad fact widely known: Orpheus melted the heart of Persephone, but Zooey Deschanel never had ours. Rather, as the vocals-and-charm portion of She & Him, she needed to convince legions of music snobs that an independently successful actress/rock girlfriend/It Girl had actual musical bona fides.
The results of the initial attempt (Volume One, 2008) were so lovely. Lovely like very few albums seem to be anymore. The melodies were distilled and clingy. The singing was well done, actually, and M. Ward constructed a hefty group of old-soul, new-life songs, featuring two underrated new sounds: the miraculous saddle-shoe doo-wop sound of a backing group of multi-tracked harmony Zooey Deschanels, and the sighing sound of thousands of music snobs getting over themselves.
Volume Two (2010) continued the laudable attention to detail and pleasantly surprised with the ability to expand said meticulousness over a substantially wider canvas. The songs were bigger, in some cases breathtakingly bigger, but they remained both primly-executed (Mr. Ward does not waste notes) and endearing. This was still doo-wop, but it was something much closer to the Phil Spector version: simplicity writ big and bold. Immortality with fewer letters.
This month’s Volume 3 pivots, for some better and some worse, toward London. More precisely, toward Morrissey—whom we must assume has also seen the inside of a few pairs of saddle shoes in his day. On spec, it is a pretty solid idea. Per execution, as far as England goes, mildly less so.
The album opens in glorious blazing fashion, with two different Zooey vocal elements setting the mood of “I’ve Got Your Number Son”: a soaring falsetto melody and, of course, the Deschanels ooh-ing a background harmony. The Spector-sized drums and bass boot up within 20 seconds, and we are off to the sock hop. Handclaps at the one-minute mark, followed ten seconds later by a cascading vocal countermelody, combine to make this something of a magnum opus for She & Him.
“I’m not talkin’ to you anymore,” from the chorus of second track “Never Wanted Your Love,” is exactly the type of faux tell-off that used to thickly populate 1950s rock ‘n roll. Of course you’re not talkin’ to him anymore: you are now singing to him. So, uh, yes, you showed him. There is above-average brilliance in retracing history’s lyrical steps like this. She & Him have done it before to wonderful effect (Volume Two’s “Ridin’ In My Car” for example—apostrophes may be the giveaway here) and it works again on Volume 3. The technique—I am telling you off, but I am singing to you about it over this happy little melody here—is an amber-preserved weird type of irony-free irony, and it is period-specific for the doo-wop era.
And then, a minute-and-a-half into “Never Wanted Your Love,” as we navigate the string-laden gorgeous melody of Love Gone Bad, the first glimpse of Morrissey’s quiff in the background: “All I know is that I’m trying to be clever / Everybody’s clever these days.”
This is probably too close to the target to be accidental. Among the snobs’ snobs, among the effete elite, the Smiths’ “Rubber Ring” claims a prominent place among the oft-debated, never-resolved ranking of Most Underrated Smiths Songs of All Time, as well as The Best. The reasons why the song is so beloved, and why it simultaneously tends to be overlooked, include a shading of She & Him-ness: the simple guitar line sounds like it was clipped from the 1950s; the music and the lyrics are quite specifically about the music of our sad young lives, and—oh, lordy—the Oscar Wilde.
Because it was, alas, Oscar who originally wrote, “Everybody’s clever nowadays.” And in “Rubber Ring,” it was Morrissey himself pivoting: from a song about the pop songs that we outgrow but shouldn’t ever forget, toward hopeless, bitter, wailing unrequited love. “Rubber Ring” begins as an adorable pop song and three minutes later has warped into a stunning mess of cries and noise…and the sound bite from a production of “The Importance of Being Earnest.”
What in Vauxhall is happening here? Why has this dark-side-of-the-Morrissey infected the second pop song of a She & Him volume? Is someone upset here? Is there a cloud in the sky? The second-time-in-two-songs helping of handclaps says No, but still. Somewhere, a raindrop has landed.
The synthesis weirdly yet appealingly continues on the album’s fourth track, “I Could’ve Been Your Girl.” The melody and strings could have been culled from “Strangeaways, Here We Come,” and disarmingly, even Zooey’s deepening voice starts to sound a little like Morrissey. Morrissey doesn’t necessarily sing about four leaf clovers (generally nine-leaf only for his songs,) or about how “If I could do it over I’d send you the pillow that I cry on,” but still. One must make allowances for variances in decades. (In amusing truth, Moz actually did sing "Send me the pillow / The one that you dream on / and I'll send you mine" at the end of "Some Girls are Bigger Than Others.")
It is not all English homage. Track 5 “Turn to White,” whittles the production down to a delicate breathy ballad that sounds 55 years old, and by track 6 “Somebody Sweet to Talk To,” the Deschanels are again in full flower. The organ and piano nudge the first portion of this song forward toward the 1970s…right up to the point that the multi-tracked backup voices belt out the chorus, when it is back to the 1950s we happily go.
With track 12 “London,” we have arrived at the final Morrissey tube stop. The format this time is a fairly clunky piano ballad; the complementary disappointment comes courtesy of the realization that Morrissey himself made roughly the same song, also about London but a hell of a lot better, in 2004 and called it, “Come Back to Camden.” Here, a comparison:
Zooey: “Oh, London, where the clouds never go away / I keep my coat on, from September ‘til May”
Morrissey: “Drinking tea with the taste of the Thames / Sullenly on a chair on the pavement”
Game, set, match, etc. Let us move on.
She & Him, as it turns out, do not seem capable of making lousy albums. The impact of the music itself might not be overwhelming, but the sum effect is several notches beyond Very Good and within earshot of Beloved. Their songs both grow on and linger with the listener, kind of like the best oldies, really.
This, then, is the rapidly approaching She & Him epistemological dilemma: essentially the entire roster of 1950s and 1960s doo-wop-pop-vocal-etc. recording artists came, saw, conquered, and disappeared within the span of a precious few singles each. There were a ton of such pop artists, but none save the Beach Boys (whose inclusion in said genre is a real reach) persisted over decades or generations with the ongoing production of new material. Artistically evolving music has been by-and-large the exclusive domain of album-rock entities.
So where does that leave She & Him? Their sound, somewhat wondrous and dear, is now three relatively complete albums old. They are edging past their doo-wop, girl-group expiration date. Can this band evolve over time? We should not want them to.
Keepers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12 (Yes, I know, but still. She sounds adorable.) 13
