There are, roughly, two kinds of musicians in this world: the ones who make grand gestures that suggest the universe’s infinite depth, complexity and wonder, and the ones who execute their ideas with such perfect simplicity that they make you believe-- often for 3 minutes at a time-- that the world might actually be flat after all. L.A.-via-Boston DIY grunge-popper Colleen Green stands resolutely in the second group. Her scrappy brand of minimalism follows in the tradition of Beat Happening, the Ramones, and Blink-182 (she’s cited the band’s 1993—1999 run as a crucial influence; in other words, nothing after the fart-and-boner-joke auteurs’ short-lived “mature phase”) and is based in a faith that most things worth saying can be expressed with just a deadpan drum machine, an uncomplicated couplet, and three torpedoed power chords. Green’s persona is a logical extension of her music, too. When an interviewer asked her last year to elaborate on the lyrics to her song “Green One” (what did green signify, he wanted to know—nature? her family name? weed?) her response to this question was as laconic, goofy, and no-frills as one of her best songs: “I dunno, it’s like, green is just what I AM, you know?” To ask Colleen Green what does it all mean, man? is sort of like asking Joey Ramone to elaborate on the pedagogical philosophy of the teaching methods at Rock & Roll High School.
The songs on Green’s Hardly Art debut Sock it to Me are brazenly simple, but they have a shrugging, take-me-as-I-am charm that makes them feel like celebrations of their own limitations. All of her songs begin with a nearly identical beat made by a drum machine that sounds like a model discontinued about 20 years ago. When asked why she uses a drum machine, she’s said it’s because she doesn’t know how to play the drums; I doubt she will ever learn. Her music is anti-striving: why push past your limits, it seems to ask, when you can just get stoned (her Twitter handle, it must be said, is “@colleengreen420”) and then write some pretty solid songs with the chords you already know?
Sock it to Me mines the melodic sensibility and lyrical themes of 60s girl groups-- good boyfriends (“When He Tells Me”), bad boyfriends (“Darkest Eyes”) and mean girls at school (“Every Boy Wants a Normal Girl”). But while the first wave of girl group music was a profession of collectivity and shared wisdom, Green’s music is proudly solo, the product of one singular, isolated person. Not that it bothers her. About a minute-and-a-half into the album, on the infectious, wound “Only One”, she engages in a multi-tracked call-and-response chant with herself. “Oh yeah/ Uh-huh/ Oh god/ I really love my boyfriend,” she sings, and then plays her own backing singer: “She really loves her boyfriend.” In Green’s solitary bedroom-pop universe, loneliness isn’t a source of sadness so much as aesthetic choice and, occasionally, a well-executed punch line.
Sock it to Me comes on the heels of a couple solid cassette releases-- Green One, Cujo, and the awesomely titled Descendents-wink Milo Goes To Compton-- and tightens her established formula without cleaning it up too much. When Green’s on (which, on this 10-song album, is a little more than half the time), her melodic sensibility is almost Merritt-esque; in fact, the delightful “Taxi Driver” sounds like a long-lost Claudia Gonson-sung track off the Magnetic Fields’ Distortion and has a silly, curmudgeonly conceit to match (“I wanna be a taxi driver/ I wouldn’t have to talk to anybody”). The sun-scorched “Time in the World” also ranks among her best, its distorted synthesizer riff adding the perfect amount of blown-out, overexposed atmosphere to its beach-pop hook. Green’s strongest songs are almost always her upbeat ones, though. She hasn’t quite figured out a way to translate her music’s charms into the slower material, and so after getting off to a strong start, Sock it to Me moves from a sugar rush to a diabetic coma about halfway through, no thanks to the somnolent title track. But the B-side picks up beginning with “Darkest Eyes”, which combines grumbling power chords with some of the record’s most poignant lyrics: “I tell him every day he’s the only one I wanna see/ And his eyes look right through me.”
Green’s songs are like single-panel stickfigure comics. Some people will dismiss them as amateurishly two-dimensional, while plenty of others will find their personable, unpretentious ethos crucial to their appeal. But at its most sly, Green’s music seems to be mocking the very idea that an artist needs to grasp for depth or profundity as she evolves. The darkest song on the predominantly sunny Sock it to Me addresses some kind of unnamed anxiety-- it’s called “Heavy Shit” and its most revealing lyric goes, “Heavy shit on my mind.” Still, like most of Sock it to Me, maybe it’s sharper and more cathartic than it seems. After all, turning bad feelings into flat, darkly funny cartoons is one surefire way to defang them.
