It's been five-and-a-half long years since Saturday Looks Good to Me, Eastern Michigan's premier temp agency for indie-poppers, gave us Fill Up the Room. Not that Saturday bossman Fred Thomas hasn't kept himself busy, forming the dreamy City Center and issuing a couple Neil Young-ish LPs under his own name. Thomas, ever the compartmentalizer, largely abandoned the sweeping romance of Saturday's Motown-and-Northern Soul-inflected indie-pop, letting his most famous project fall by the wayside in order to pursue these noisier, rootsier stylings. But, though many, him included, thought Fill Up the Room would remain the last Saturday LP, the songs that wound up on One Kiss Ends It All would sound awfully strange from any other Thomas project. Despite their fluid personnel-- Thomas frequently recruits new singers for each Saturday LP-- the idea of what a Saturday song is and isn't hasn't changed: great big hooks, peculiar little emotions.
That said, One Kiss Ends It All doesn't exactly pick up where Fill Up the Room left off. With the benefit of hindsight, Fill Up seems something of an outlier in the Saturday catalog, having straightened out some of the blurrier edges that marked the band's earlier work. One Kiss, on the other hand, nudges the frame, casting everything at a slightly odd angle. Little scratches and pops abound deep in the mix, vocals get warped halfway through verses, saxophones collide headlong into strings. The whole thing's just silly with melody. The warm, wistful One Kiss plays like a dodgy mixtape of lonesome teenage classics dubbed over so many times that "Where Did Our Love Go?" is starting to bleed through "The Stars of Track and Field".
Amidst all these instrumental crinkles, One Kiss is best at its most direct. The jaunty "New City" takes a rather a slash-and-burn stance on public policy: "The city's falling apart," new recruit Carol Catherine sings, "It's time to build a new city," a hard-to-miss allusion to the ailing Detroit some of Saturday call home. "Are You Kissing Anyone?" is pure vaseline-on-lens, achey last-dance-at-prom stuff.
When that directness falters, so does everything else. Thomas' occasional overreliance on metaphor muddies the sentiments at the heart of some of these tracks, and a couple songs find him mixing the vocals low enough as to render their words virtually incomprehensible; one wonders why he'd invite somebody over to sing only to bury the take in reverb. Vocally, Thomas is in fine company throughout One Kiss, but between the constant turnover behind the microphone and all that instrumental foofaraw, One Kiss sometimes feels a little overstuffed. "Negative Space", ironically enough, gets the worst of it; after a stirring verse, the song dips into spacey ambience, essentially killing time before its rousing climax. The good songs on One Kiss are constantly reshuffling themselves, shifting fidelities, rearranging instruments; the couple of really great ones ("New City", "Sunglasses") seem to dispose with all the fuss and get right to the point.
Still, when words fail Thomas and company, their music rarely does. Despite the rough patches, One Kiss is largely rich and rousing, quick to grab your ear even when it fails to snag your emotions. It's not always easy to put names to the in-between feelings Thomas explores with Saturday Looks Good to Me: not just love, but yearning; not just missing someone, but the way that someone you're missing can start to feel like a specter, an "Invisible Friend". Thomas occasionally puts too many layers between himself and the listener, and it's not always easy to tell what he means to say, particular when most of it's being said by someone else. But throughout One Kiss, it's obvious how much Thomas missed writing these stirring, expansive, romantic pop songs for Saturday Looks Good to Me. Even as they sputter through certain emotions, that longing comes through loud and clear.
