Cry for help? Come-on? Exactly how much heavy breathing does Portland, Oregon have in it? My favorite record of the last year, the Blow's Paper Television, was all sexed-up frustration, or frustration sexed-up: performance art by way of crippling, demented, and public sexual insecurities. Portland has probably the best DIY scene in the country, talented and clever musicians, the labels to collaborate, and they're all in bands by themselves. On a stage, they are alone; in the studio, pairs at the most. Do they even realize the guy next door is making the exact same sweaty complaint into the exact same laptop-- that theirs are problems that could be solved together?
Enter Panther, né Charlie Salas-Humara: lousy video breakdancer (catch him in the video for The Thermals "Pillar of Salt" and in clips for his own songs), Justin Timberlake/Prince worshipper, and sex-jam crooner. Secret Lawns, his debut album, is his scene's basic synthesis: Bobby Birdman's lounge-act croon, YACHT's rap-radio obsession, E*Rock's basement boombox beats, White Rainbow's laptop freak-out, the Blow's autoerotic romance, reduced to something as spare and sharp as the snap music "How Does it Feel?" rips off.
I mean, the video for "You Don't Want Your Nails Done" is Panther dancing, tearing around a tiny cardboard room: cardboard cell phone, cardboard iPod, cardboard electrical outlet. Is there a better metaphor for Salas-Humara's grind, or Portland's collective grind, than the re-creation of the familiar in miniature, rebuilt to look similar but work totally differently, or not at all?
Hapless redundancy as expressive art: his opener is called "Use Your Mouth to Breathe" and it's Casio-thump by way of a falsetto "ooooh" and a plea-- "You've got to misunderstaaand." Closer "Tiger's Touch" is a similar scheme, built twice as complex. The heaviness is real, with a theremin-synth laser show and a fuzzy string-swell coda, but the sentiment doesn't move far at all past the intro: "Don't touch me baby/ You know I've got issues/ I've never been touched/ Never before/ Sit on the couch/ But not next to me." Sex is everywhere but where he wants it.
Take soul jams like the Michael Jackson-channeling "Telephone Wire", where he abandons his budget-priced retro r&b to use voice as instrument, and slow-crooner "Talk for Tuesday", which forgets itself halfway through like a broken merry-go-round, and add them to the unconfident-confident Timberlake dance tracks, and you get the cardboard version of FutureSex/LoveSounds, minus Timbaland and the talent. No knock there.
Those hung up on whether or not Charlie is serious about the whole thing probably should catch the next flight to Portland, where people don't have to answer that question because no one around asks it. If the whole album was "Tigers Touch", no one would outside the city either. But Panther's DIY cuts both ways: Secret Lawns is probably about 60% finished. It's anchored at the beginning, end, and middle, and floating free and indistinct throughout. Which makes it more suitable in small, frustration-charged doses than as a whole meal. Which, by the way, Oregonians out there, is still possible-- you can eat the cake and make music about eating the cake, not just about wanting to eat cake all the time. Gotta be a musician out there for everybody, right?
