If I might uncharacteristically wax intellectual for a bit here, I'd like to start off with a short discussion about the symbolic character of the Motor City: Detroit, Michigan. For all the shit the D has taken over the years, it seems to be integrally representative of certain American trends through the ages, be it the mass exodus of the middle class to the suburbs, the collapse of industry and associated decay of the labor movement, or the cost-cutting decline of the once-proud Tigers (where have you gone, Chet Lemon?). Musically speaking it's been no less important, from Motown's rise paralleling the civil rights movement to the futuristic idealism amidst crumbling factories paradox intrinsic to techno.
Now we find ourselves in third age of Detroit musical prominence, and depending on what kind of righteous mood you're in, the success of the White Stripes, Kid Rock, and Eminem is either an honoring or a pillaging of the city's black culture. Evidence for the latter is provided by the fact that the above notables, Eminem and his celluloid-dramatized trailer park (soon to be a thrill ride at Universal Studios) excepted, originate from the expansive Detroit suburbs, the endpoint of that 70s pale-face migration. If you're the kind to grant weight to back-story authenticity, there's little in the strip-mall continuum of Novi and Rochester to justify either blues-rock wailing or hip-hop indignation. So if there's one thing you can grant Pas/Cal-- natives of the burbs that would rather consider themselves satellites of highbrow Ann Arbor than empty Detroit-- it's that they aren't denying their identity. If we're embracing our mental tendencies to pigeonhole, the quartet is purveyors of that most whitest sound: slightly fey indie-pop.
The boys of Pas/Cal don't want to be Robert Johnson or Run DMC, they want to be Stuart Murdoch, as their rumpled preppie wardrobe on the cover and the literary fonts suggest. Unashamed of their Brian Wilson fandom, they obligingly title the opening song on The Handbag Memoirs "The Bronze Beached Boys", and possibly naming themselves for mathematician Blaise Pascal doesn't do much to reduce their nerdy image. But like the Detroit suburbs themselves-- which could be swapped with commuter towns anywhere in the US without anyone noticing-- Pas/Cal's indie-pop never makes an impression deeper than any nice, pleasant, derivative music. The first half of this six-song EP-- each track bearing painfully bookish names like "I Wanna Take You Out in Your Holiday Sweater"-- is full of capable sunny-day soundtracking with occasional quirks, like the brass breakdown of "I'd Bet My Life That You Bet Your Life." However, nothing suggests that these dapper dandies are anything more than big fans of Carl Newman's pre-Pornographers days in Zumpano.
With a downward slide over the last half unloading the undercooked "Grown Men Go Go", the lost-without-a-map instrumental "Marion/Miriam" and the Beatles-by-numbers "This Ain't For Everyone", Pas/Cal can't sustain an EP shorter than a sitcom, suggesting a less-than-rosy career prognosis. It says something that their biggest attribute is their predictable, familiar character, and it bears mentioning that they don't even do the suburb-jam with as much energy as some of their regional compatriots (if I might name-drop for a second, I hereby plug The Little Band That Could've, the Red Shirt Brigade). It all begs the question of what's worse: staying within demographical lines and coming off dull, or donning the cloaks of cultural carpetbaggers to reap occasional rewards. In either case you're being sold second-hand goods, and although their selection is limited, the tributary Pas/Cal are at least up front about where they got them.
