Portastatic will never be bigger than Superchunk, Merge Records, or Mac McCaughan, the North Carolina teenager who co-founded both institutions in the late 1980s. By now, McCaughan's released dozens of titles and hundreds of songs as Portastatic, the living-room-four-track project he started as an outlet for non-Superchunk stuff around 1992. Portastatic's been a sporadic if swift stream of 7"s, compilation tracks, EPs, and LPs-- all steadily increasing in sound quality-- ever since. It's even a fairly steady live band these days. But such prolificacy, even from a vet running one of the land's biggest indie labels, hasn't equaled popularity: Those who know Superchunk's "Slack Motherfucker" or "Precision Auto" don't necessarily know Portastatic's "Summer of the Shark" or "I Wanna Know Girls". Double ditto for those who know Merge's recent greatest hits, say the Arcade Fire's "Rebellion (Lies)", Spoon's "I Turn My Camera On", or Camera Obscura's "Let's Get Out of This Country".
Some Small History won't change this: A 44-track collection gathering Portastatic B-sides, rarities, demos, and unreleased tunes from the last 18 years, Some Small History jumps styles, instruments, recording techniques and eras with almost each successive track. Sequenced irrespective of chronology, it's an overwhelming jumble of moods and ideas that offers neither an easy definition nor a target audience. There's a bustling acoustic cover of Bob Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" and a perfectly dissolving take on Hot Chip's "Boy From School". A charging electric anthem called "Trajectory" clashes against the solemn "Easily Aroused" and its hilarious bits of erotic bar talk, which bumps into a dreamy, wailing-from-a-cavern number called "Race You Home". "Weighted Raft" sounds like homemade Throbbing Gristle mayhem, and "Gray Robins" gauzes its vocals into infinity over a ridiculous reggae-in-the-elevator bass bounce. While the full-band, piano-and-guitar jangle of "Portraits From Before the War" benefits from John Vanderslice's Tiny Telephone studio, "Dragging a Crow" suggests Jandek recording a George Thorogood jam into a cell phone. Though some of McCaughan's best work to date finally gets wide release with this set, some of its tracks could use second vocal passes, significant knob twists, or aggressive edits. As an avenue into a fairly substantial history, it's difficult.
But I'd suggest you dig harder: Some Small History, like most of McCaughan's mutli-band discography, establishes his reputation as a different sort of indie rock icon. In the dorm-room dreamhouse of Malkmus, Mascis, Martsch, Moore, and Pollard, McCaughan remains the blue-collar, insight-before-eccentricity smart guy. At his best, McCaughan has long espoused a lived-in, livable indie rock schematic. With a voice that's distinctive if not dynamic, he wails about familiar situations. Just as most can imagine the jackass sitting on the "Slack Motherfucker" stool, the fleeting seasonal romance depicted in "A Cunning Latch"-- "Light comes in too early in the day/ Wakes me up but won't chase those dreams away"-- is a familiar subject, freshly stated. McCaughan writes functional songs about ordinary things-- cute girls, bad politics, fleeting romances-- and mixes the obscure (referencing The Misfits' Marilyn Monroe during "Skinny Glasses Girl") with the obvious (cadging from Public Enemy during "I Wanna Know Girls").
These songs are rich without being arcane, accessible without being elementary. Malkmus and Martsch have rarely found that balance. Similarly, while McCaughan's a capable and occasionally riveting guitarist, he's not a complicated one. The inquisitive "Your Own Cloud", written the day Kurt Cobain died, augments simple chords with a push-and-play keyboard effect, and the acoustic demo of "Little Fern" adds a harmonica line that you could learn with 10 minutes and six bucks at a Cracker Barrel. The alternate trials with harsh noise ("Useless Switch"), samples ("Gray Robins") and pitch-shifting ("Secret Session") on History are, by and large, just that-- trials.
This isn't an album, though, even if it's sequenced a bit like one. As a collection, it succeeds in being both a study of Portastatic's evolution and the first substantial release of some of the band's best: Lo-fi shamble "Not the Same" (originally issued as a 7" set opposite the Extra Glenns) uses synthesizers, shaky drums, and doubled vocals to make a silly little love plea. "Had" bulks the build of the 1994 album version with a band that includes Polvo's Ash Bowie, and its lumbering rhythm, thick guitars and impetuous vocals make it an essential variation on Portastatic's solitary quirk. McCaughan's cover of Ryan Adams' "Oh, My Sweet Carolina" is staid and beautiful, its sentimental heart plated with his ever-anxious voice. After all, that's the juxtaposition McCaughan's always worked: He's a misanthrope with a romantic hope, a late-twenties rock star laughing at silly girls in bars, a 39-year-old father of two turning electro-pop bliss into acoustic rock. That is, even if it's a small history, it's foremost an interesting one.
