Can somebody please give me an exact date as to when the turbid relationship between my peers, armed with their indie ethics, and corporate America cooled and reshaped itself into a symbiotic coupling? When I fell asleep in 1991, Neil Young was preaching the evils of product placement and even Pat Boone was wore leather. Now, I wake up in the new millennium to a media who 'nurtures and exposes' the artists it once worked so hard to oppress while asking for 'little in return.' Granted, some commercial pairings can be traced back to a logical and rational mind, as in the case of the Shins and their donation of "New Slang" to McDonalds. But had I known that drinking MGD would make me as depressed as Bill Callahan, I'd have opted for the party ambience of your average Coors commercial. Seriously... I could've learned to tolerate the occasional 'crunching blues riff.' Unfortunately, our faceless corporate antagonists have saved their most horrendous act of sacrilege for last, as earlier this month General Mills unveiled their newest commercial, which features an animated Stephen Malkmus gliding gracefully down a rainbow shat by a clearly nerve-addled rabbit singing "Trix are everything to me."
Luckily, Ian McKaye saw this coming some fifteen years before the fact. Out of sheer desperation he founded his independent record label, Dischord, boasting a stable of artists dedicated to satiating that whining Marxist in each of us. Over the years, Dischord has been a haven for acts who are as well versed in anti-capitalist rhetoric as they are in music theory, leaving the label with only one real problem: selling records. You see, when you release a consistent output of music created by artists who are hell-bent on never selling out, you sometimes release product that consciously sounds like crap for the sake of not being commercially viable. That's right, Pupils... stick to The Man.
On their eponymous debut, Daniel Higgs and Asa Osbourne run the gamut of your typical two-guitar and drum machine group. Truth be told, to cite this as rationalization for making such a plodding and disingenuous album as The Pupils ignores the archetypal work of Timbuk3 (admit it, you still own Greetings From...). If anything, The Pupils are consistently unremarkable. The whole disc plays like the White Stripes covered by a small geriatric community, afraid or unaware of how to change tempo with a drum machine. Sounds like a novelty worthy of Langley School's fame!
Having an established musical precedent to contend with can only hinder the critical reception of a side project and, despite the fact that Osbourne and Higgs have only managed to break new ground for mediocrity in their day job as Lungfish, the album sorely misses the sophisticated dynamics and occasionally evocative lyrical content of The Unanimous Hour or Pass and Stow. Rather, we get a litany of muddied social observations ("All the People") and a few psilocybin-induced meanderings ("The Mind is a Hole in the Body," "I Will Remain Human for Another Day"). If this album truly is, as the lyrics suggest, the product of a few nights of inebriated excess, I strongly urge The Pupils to enter a 12-step program. That way, when they finally reach step nine and "make direct amends to all persons they've harmed, except when to do so would injure them or others," I might get an apology for having to write about this crap.
