Power pop is easy to do, but difficult to do well. Guitar bands playing sorta catchy hooks at sorta fast tempos abound, most hewing closely to the same styles and structures. Occasionally you get a Cheap Trick, Big Star, Fight Songs-era Old 97s, or early-90s Matthew Sweet, artists who take to the form like a birthright. But they're usually the exceptions. So why do the Broken West, a five-piece hailing from Los Angeles, sound so distinctive even when they don't sound new or necessarily unique? Their influences are all immediately recognizable and their songs all hummably predictable, and yet their Merge debut, I Can't Go On, I'll Go On, reveals the band to be confidently inventive and assured in their collective identity (nevermind that they had to change the band name just months before the release of this album).
I've been parsing this question ever since the review copy of I Can't Go On showed up on my doorstep late last year, and I finally found the answer when, out of sheer coincidence, I took a last-minute trip to Los Angeles, a place I've been fascinated with since reading Joan Didion's The White Album in college but had never managed to visit. On the return flight, as soon as I heard the chiming intro to "On the Bubble", I was transported right back to that Los Feliz apartment veranda, sipping a vodka and vitamin water, shooting the breeze with friends, and listening to the noise of the city as it sprawled in all directions around me. The strongest and most inviting aspect of I Can't Go On is its sense of place, effortlessly depicted but surprisingly specific. These songs evoke sunny skies, scrubbrush canyons, bad traffic, palm trees, and half-recognized minor celebrities.
Rather than patterning themselves on one or two particular artists, the Broken West draw on past local scenes to strengthen those evocations without being obvious. The handclap hopscotch rhythms and bright guitar sound on "Slow" and the airy vocals and blocky keyboards on "Shiftee" recall the pop scene of the late 60s, while the songs like "Abigail" and "Baby on My Arm", with their strummy moods, evoke the Laurel Canyon scene of the 70s and the 80s Paisley Underground. And I swear I hear a little 80s Sunset Strip hair metal in some of the guitars, but I might be dreaming.
Occasionally the Broken West root themselves too deeply in the city's past, and I Can't Go On threatens to become an exercise in historical re-creation. But that sense of being stuck in the past is never pervasive: Despite a few stumbles (the melody on "Brass Ring" never resolves itself satisfactorily, and closer "Like a Light" lacks the airtight structure of previous songs), the band transcends base nostalgia. They compensate for their somewhat geeky obsessiveness with confident songwriting, inventive arrangements, and verite production that emphasizes the band's breakneck live energy, especially on "On the Bubble" and "Hale Sunrise". Best of all is "Down in the Valley", resurrected from their equally strong EP The Dutchman's Gold, which they self-released in 2004 when the band was still know as the Brokedown. It's a solid four minutes of churning guitars, fizzy harmonies, and insanely catchy melodies, anchored by a chorus that simultaneously plays into the city's good-time vibe while slyly undercutting it: "Sun down, blood horizon, now it feels all right/ No one feels the darkness down in the valley tonight."
Despite their California origins, the Broken West aren't pioneers staking out new territory. Like L.A. County, the terrain has been well walked for years. And yet, I'd rather hang out in their familiar L.A. than in the Thrills' fantasy city, the Chili Peppers' rich-boy funk metropolis, or Jane's Addiction's romanticized junkie playground. And maybe they don't even represent the real L.A. past or present (and how could they with no Compton beats or Western swing?), but simply the L.A. of our collective imagination.
