Dear Chuck: saying toodles to one's first long-term boyfriend is difficult, but this letter marks the end of your tight psychological grip on me. Your worst egregious abuse of my sheltered palate was to make me sign that Purchase Obscure Really New Music Only Manifesto (or, PORNMOM). The declaration had its good points: I didn't mind offloading Tortoise's oeuvre, and I admit that I bought Dean Wareham products out of a strange, sentimental notion of an alternate Boston renaissance. But demanding that we limit ourselves to debuts or upstarts was getting ridiculous. Sure, Guitar Romantic is fun, but what exactly about The Exploding Hearts is new?
I remain angriest, though, that you pressured me to dump my American Analog Set archives. How I bristled, pathetically silent, when you called them "late-90s drone-turds," and said that their album titles connoted either children's books or romance novels, building (of course) to your gauche "riff" on "American Anal Log Sex." How painfully I recollect your cackle when I asked if I could at least keep their branch-out material, Know by Heart and the remix EP Updates, never expecting you to be such a cropduster about it. Whose sticker-clogged clipboard recorded the cool points you scored for noting how one of the remixes sounded like a track from Gary Wilson's You Think You Really Know Me?
That you will miss out on the lilting keeper Promise of Love inspires only pity. I grant you, through the album's first half, your theory-- that AAS doesn't release albums so much as sequels-- applies. Just as "Punk as Fuck" kicked off Know by Heart with an elliptical, almost instrumental, ironic nod to genre straightjacketism, "Continuous Hit Music" offers a self-circumnavigating wedge of cuddle-core that appropriates and transcends its titular cliché. (Face it, Chuck, wherever you are, mid-scramble for Datsuns tickets: in the era of Colin Powell's huddled-masses-hating scion running the Federal Communication Commission, the phrase "continuous hit music" is terrifying to approach. This band rebaptizes top-down "programming" logic beautifully, especially in an acoustic hidden-track reprise.)
I'm not complaining, but "Hard to Find" and "Come Home Baby Julie, Come Home" also play like Know by Heart revamps, their coy keyboards and clean drums seasoning the warm, warm guitar swirl. "You Own Me" is a daggum culmination of the previous album's make-out succor. This Chet-Baker-does-indie-pop jam could prod the urban-legendary beakless chickens of KFC to liplock, but it also made me think of your tyranny, Chuck, since it asserts during its breakdown, "You own me/ Control me."
Then: look out world, because AAS drops into a mid-tempo trilogy! Begone, all who'd demean this troupe as Low & The Family Stone, or as traffickers in Yo La tingle. No shisre, Chuck-- the title track, "The Hatist", and "Fool Around" rank among the year's finest tight-rock salvos from a band nailing itself giddily to the cross of its choice, comfortable with its singular personality/idiom; even your precious find, Broken Social Scene, suggests a shape-shifting, promethean collision between The Sea & Cake and The Multiple Cat. These tracks float, but scoot, like a jetski with a mute setting.
So go lick a legacy-scab, Chuck. This band of membrane-rangers makes my cuticles throb. The whispered vox mirror the guitars' inhaling and exhaling, and the slow-drift song structures are downright platetectonic. Yes, the last song's a meandering letdown, and yes, the tone is mannered, like that film you forgot, The Deep End-- both works are almost ostentatiously understated. You might call Promise of Love soft and unnecessary, the musical equivalent of foreskin, but as our country inches closer to becoming one big cop bar, these forty not-so-new minutes offer overdue comfort. This disc is aural aloe.
