Kingston, Ontario, is a quintessential college community, a strategic pit stop between Toronto and Montreal where touring bands can earn a little extra gas money playing the campus-pub circuit. The city boasts an elite university, Queen's, and birthed one of the most popular rock bands in Canada (if nowhere else), the Tragically Hip. It also happens to house one of the country's most notorious maximum-security prisons, and spawned boorish rock-'em-sock-'em hockey proponent Don Cherry. Given the city's conflicting histories, it's appropriate that noise-pop native sons PS I Love You are such a wonderful mess of contradictions. The odd-couple duo of Paul Saulnier (guitar/vocals) and Benjamin Nelson (drums) couch their considerable technical skill in a grungy garage-rock dressing, conveying palpably heartfelt emotion through mostly indecipherable yelping. And with Meet Me at the Muster Station, they've produced a compact debut that nonetheless feels momentously epic.
As indie-rock has splintered into myriad variants over the past 20 years while simultaneously becoming part of the mainstream, it's rare to hear a young band fulfill one of the music's initial primary functions: to give voice to those back-of-the-classroom loners who are ostracized by the jocks, but aren't quite willing to embrace the rigid aesthetic codes of goths or metalheads. In Saulnier, we see a cross-breed of two outsider archetypes that rarely figure in contemporary indie. He's a Black Francis-like barker who'll happily break out into nonsensical, throat-shredding hysterics in order to scare away the normals, but he's also a J Mascis-ian introvert who finds it easier to express his true feelings through his fretboard. The duo's calling-card track, "Facelove", is a perfect encapsulation of how Saulnier compensates for social anxieties with guitar heroics: after spending the song's first and only verse trying to spill his guts out to a girl, he essentially says "fuck it" and launches a series of majestic phase-pedalled swirls that translate his garbled words into a crystal-clear, six-stringed communiqué.
Muster Station is rife with similarly thrilling displays of the frantic and the ecstatic: the sustained, skyward surge of "Butterflies & Boners" proves every bit as glorious as its title, while "Breadends"-- inspired by a friend's revelation that he used to rob banks-- sees Saulnier reveling in the vicarious thrill of shouting, "gimme all your fucking money!" It's apt that this declaration of criminal fantasy is one of the album's few easily discernible lyrics. While Saulnier's maniacal-misfit act may be reminiscent of certain 1980s indie-rock icons, the elusive elucidations of Meet Me at the Muster Station are symptomatic of a wired world where social-media dependency and online role-playing have made verbal, face-to-face communication feel all the more awkward and difficult. This is an album fueled by the frustration of not being able to adequately express your frustration, no more so than on the roiling tempest that is "2012". Saulnier's bottom-of-a-well vocal makes it hard to tell if the song is in fact about the popular end-of-the-world prophecy, but the urgent, thrashing delivery makes PS I Love You's intentions crystal clear: they want apocalypse now.
