For a while, Maryland singer/songwriter Sam Ray was in a group called Teen Suicide that was intensely loved by a few. Ray grew weary of the melodramatic band name, apparently, and all it implied, so Teen Suicide perished, and the hushed and lovely indie pop outfit Julia Brown was born. Ray introduced his new band to his fans with a defensive flourish: "If you liked Teen Suicide 'cause of pop songwriting you'll probably like the new band but if you just liked the really over-dramatic drug addict depression catharsis stuff you'll be disappointed and I'll be glad," he wrote on the Teen Suicide Facebook page. He probably didn't need to issue such a ringing pronouncement; Julia Brown, while softer, explore similar darkness with a sweet sadness that does, in fact, feel grown-up.
To Be Close to You is their first official release. It was recorded straight to tape, an act of aesthetic devotion that ensures singular focus on things like incidental sounds: In between songs, you hear doodly guitar moments, muffled coughs, the muttering and teasing of his band mates. Tape hiss isn't a background element here, it's an instrument: on some songs, it's practically the lead singer. "Recorded at various places over a long period of time," the liner notes indicate, and you can hear, in the busy shuffling of the players and the constantly changing room-space, the tape player being plopped in a series of bedrooms.
For lo-fi or home-taping pop aficionados, this kind of sound world is a reward in itself, and for hardcore fans, To Be Close to You will be instantly inviting. The sound has the blotted, bleedy edges you associate with the tape medium; every sharp edge smoothed out, every sound muffled and half-swallowed. To Be Close to You streams by in a soothing murmur that registers as intimate above all.
The sound is so warm and reassuring that you initially miss the complexity and craft of the music. But on repeated listens, you hear a serious songwriter's mind at work. The glimmering riff on "Library" is based on a simple chord progression, but Ray's dense, arpeggiated playing locates a hypnotically cyclical tune in it that is almost as catchy as his unassuming vocal lead. When the song launches into double time, a sawing viola traces the arc of Ray's melody before he sings it. There are surprising corners to stumble on in the arrangements: the brooding "i will do this for the rest of my life" ends with some skirling backwards guitars, while "i was my own favorite tv show the summer my tv broke" ends in a little pink-blue sunset of viola, cello, glockenspiel, and harmonium. "Virginia" is built on a rickety saloon piano in 3/4 time. A few of the songs repeat themselves in acoustic demo form, just in case you like them better that way, and to give you a better sense of how they were built.
It's also a pleasure to eventually discover Sam Ray's dark, sometimes-mordant lyrics, which are also lying just beneath the cottony yawn of the tape. The bleak "how I spent my summer" opens with a brief recorded clip of someone muttering "I was doing heroin in my car and listening to 'Genius of Love'," the word "heroin" scrambled slightly. The lyrics depict someone reeling from a loss they cannot process: "I will move your clothes from one side of the bed to the other/ I will stay in your bed all day/ Whatever it takes/ Taking Valium." "i will do this for the rest of my life" turns on the shrugging refrain, "I guess you mean more to me than nothing," sung in an upward lilt that sounds like the sentiment from a construction-paper Valentine. In the song's coda, Ryan Wilson mutters "I'm trying not/ To feel anything" repeatedly.
The sweetly unassuming kind of home-made pop music that Julia Brown make is easily overlooked when it is untethered from its home base; so much of indie-pop's magic resides in its locality, and in the connections forged by flyers, 7-inches, and shows. In their Baltimore stomping grounds, Julia Brown seem like they're a big deal. In the great sea of the internet, where one small bauble after another can be plucked and cast back just as quickly, this stuff can have a harder time standing apart. But To Be Close to You rewards any undivided attention you are willing to give it. Ray's gift is as substantial as his touch is light, and at its best To Be Close to You hearkens back to the spirit of some of the broken-hearted, scrofulous sweeties of the Pacific Northwest during the 90s: Elliott Smith, for instance, or Modest Mouse during their K Records years. Ray indicated recently that he had hit the limits of lo-fi recording techniques, and was looking to expand outward: His vision seems big enough to accomodate whatever canvas he works on next.
