The last time I wrote about Boyracer for Pitchfork, I compared frontman Stewart Anderson to Bob Pollard of GBV, which left me feeling kinda icky except that it's true. Both of these guys have gone through stretches of writing more pop songs per year than you'd think anyone would except as a stunt-- you imagine them waking up and writing one while the coffee drips, another before the toast pops, a single in line at the bank, and a couple of B-sides while sitting in traffic. Put Boyracer in a room and point cheap mics in their direction and they'll give you endless happy fast-strumming guitar-pop, stuff that sounds like exuberant English indie children in a garage in 1987. They love The Smiths but they're in love with The Pastels; if the packaging matched the content, the CDs would come wrapped in Scotch tape and loose-leaf.
Except that Anderson isn't messing around, and that's what elevates this stuff: Despite the rickety joy, these are good serious pop songs. The ones on Happenstance may not be as consistent as on the band's last LP, To Get a Better Hold You've Got to Loosen Yr Grip-- the first half runs to the mediocre-- but they're more varied, and in a lot of cases more serious, more emotionally affecting. At best they start to pick up on the same charm that used to carry Belle and Sebastian-- real-life recordings of a band in a room, bashing out reckless pop with an unambitious purity that immediately wins you over. Different context, same half-nostalgic postcard allure; more machine-gun drumming and guitar feedback; noisy little notes from here and there.
I read a recent complaint that the problem with Boyracer full-lengths is never knowing which tracks to put on your mix-tapes. Pretty spot-on for this collection: All 23 of these songs are about 1:30 long and hard not to like. By my count at least nine are certifiably cool, and unlike that last full-length they run to pop crooning (and pianos!) as much as guitar buzz. "How Many Cars can You Fit in Your Garage" sounds like a blooper from a Smiths Peel Session; "A Chipped Tooth and Greasy Fingers" has a creaky punkoid quality that'll sound great in cars come summer. "I Thought Even More of You When You Told Me You Wanted Me Dead" just looks great on a mix listing, but I'm going with "On Bleached Gras", which is simple old-school indie pop of the first order.
Which is the thing here: good old English band-in-basement indie pop, totally unnecessary but endlessly charming, ever winning hearts and minds in the cozy apartments of Unrest nostalgists and the suburban bedrooms of Clientele fans. It's all too modest to go telling people they need to hear it-- but if anyone does the hard work of collecting Boyracer's two-minute gems into one 74-minute collection, it'll kill.
