New indie development: Tweemo wimps are getting some now. Joseph Gordon-Levitt has morphed from dorky supporting character who can't even throw his own punches in 10 Things I Hate About You to... dorky leading man fooling around with Zooey Deschanel in this summer's (kinda great!) (500) Days of Summer. Jim and Pam from "The Office" not only got hitched, they're already expecting. It's gotten to the point where I feel bad about my teenage cousin's romantic prospects because he started looking less like Michael Cera.
The Crayon Fields negotiate the transition from virginal boys to men with rickety chamber-pop aplomb on sophomore LP All the Pleasures of the World. On predecessor Animal Bells, which introduced the Melbourne four-piece's winningly wispy take on Zombies-Byrds harmonies and Elephant 6 ramshackleness, frontman Geoff O'Connor sang, "I want to be famous, gee." All the Pleasures of the World ditches the childishness of the debut and the obliqueness of the side project without losing sweetness or nuance. Adding strings and a new-relationship glow, it's the kind of album that could make the Crayon Fields downright lovable.
Reference points: the Crayon Fields covered heartbreaking New England folkie Kath Bloom as a recent B-side, and current fellow Down Under-er Jens Lekman is DJing an upcoming album release party. So on opening track "Mirror Ball", released on 7" last year, the object of our narrator's affection reduces him to "a virgin in a dancehall"; where the Velvet Underground and Nico promised "I'll Be Your Mirror", O'Connor reflects, "You are still my mirror ball," Pavement scrawl intersecting bashful 1960s teen-pop sway. Second single "Voice of Paradise" starts off closer to vintage Syd Barrett spaciness, then recycles one of the previous album's lyrics, like a bedsit Kurt Vile-- all to let O'Connor's beloved know how "lucky" he feels. You won't gag, I promise.
But you may get that feeling in your stomach like you just drove over a dip in the highway. All the Pleasures of the World is, in some ways, a celebration of hovering between two worlds. On the title track (and upcoming third single), O'Connor is too young to love, so he just loves everything. On slightly too long string-backed love epic "Lucky Again", which captures the embarrassing hyperbole of freshly requited adoration more accurately than I've seen outside indie romcoms, he's too young to lie about his age, but old enough to forget. And, on "Celebrate": "Surely we're old enough to have plenty to celebrate/ And young enough to have more if we wait/ But let's not today." Not a girl, not yet a woman; the innocence of classic pop, the messiness of the recent indie past.
In a song title: "Timeless", almost. This is the one the kids who believe said romcoms will be putting on mixes for new girlfriends and boyfriends. Bells and bird chirps make it easy to picture the dawn-lit scene as O'Connor murmurs, "When I wake up next to you, I forget I have a day to be dressed for." The Crayon Fields could've left this one a Nick Drake strings-and-acoustic ballad. But they don't. All the Pleasures of the World is an album for people who listen to the Clientele while reading the Sunday newspaper and making tea, and it's an album for people who listen to Camera Obscura while sighing wistfully, and most of all it's an album for people overjoyed with finding themselves, suddenly, rapturously, between hello and goodbye. "There are so many things I should've felt long ago that I'm just feeling now," O'Connor confesses on "Graceless". Hey, you know who used to sleep under a Peter Pan poster? Bruce Springsteen, that's who. Look it up.
