Rock music is all about transience. Wherever style beats substance, youth is a highly valued and unbearably scarce commodity; in rock, and particularly in more traditionally juvenile variations like emo, the hands of time are especially cruel. Bottling and selling precious youth is notoriously fickle; often, bands have long outgrown their lissome twenty-something physiques and lost all their oomph by the time they put a stamp on the completed package. And the music? It's less about conveying the universal reach of emotion than about capturing the feelings and incidental naivety of a very specific time.
While we all find ourselves immersed by that glorious pocket of beauty and invincibility at some point, its attitude isn't easy to feign, and so, bands that choose not to hang it up after their sophomore release are more likely becoming The Promise Rings or The Get-Up Kids of this world than The Flaming Lips or Wilcos. The fate of Minneapolis quartet The Plastic Constellations is still very much in flux. After issuing the stellar We Got the Movement EP in 1999, which copped everyone from Fugazi to Sonic Youth in a gruff morass of youthful ingenuity, the group followed with an equally impressive debut full-length, Let's War, securing their status as promising post-punk debutantes.
Then came a four-year hiatus, as the group's members done and went got some college. That's right: The Plastic Constellations' prodigious early yield was entirely the work of suburban high-schoolers. In an age rife with quixotic minstrels-- the bohemian equivalent of varsity football stars-- and lead guitarists with three-CD vocabularies, The Plastic Constellations were refined beyond their years. What's more, Let's War and We Got the Movement contained the kind of unbridled enthusiasm that usually trumps technical prowess, lyrical substance, and songwriting inventiveness in teenagers' judgments of the next local emo band.
Alas, if only the patrons of Hopkins, Minnesota's underground music scene knew how lucky they were. Mazatlan, the group's emergent comeback, is full of universal qualities, but perhaps most importantly, it transports the listener back to the cozy early days of music fandom, when finding a record you loved was an episodic event, and one or two songs could occupy an entire afternoon.
The Plastic Constellations aren't merely a strong outfit for their respective niche, but a mature, well-coordinated group that show great talent and even greater potential. The songs on Mazatlan resemble something conceptualized in a budding musician's hotwired brain-- virtuosity and communication between musicians being, naturally, no object-- but which so rarely get penned for the intensive and fleeting nature of the young imagination. Remarkably, the record is impressively cohesive, despite a couple questionable instances of quasi-rapping ("Movement Momentum", "Vicious Devotion") and a feeling of persistent breathlessness from the breakneck tempos.
Mazatlan runs the gamut of post-punk influences, from elder heroes Sonic Youth and Fugazi to latter-day stars like Les Savy Fav and Slint. But what makes these songs truly intriguing is The Plastic Constellations' eager exploration of odd tunings and contrasting, often atonal guitar harmonies. "Beats Like You Stole Something" is a deftly multi-tracked example of the band's licks, opening with a twinkling riff redolent of Daydream Nation's broken music box melodies before burgeoning into a full-fledged post-punk Armada. "Evil Groove" amply lives up to its title, turning in some craggy unison figures and a fragile, arpeggiated bridge section that exemplifies the band's off-kilter approach to post-punk.
Throughout the album, The Plastic Constellations find novel ways to reconcile seemingly incommensurable styles and motifs, and their unflagging technique is a constant boon. Whereas it took Les Savy Fav several years to tame their recalcitrant energy and release a coherent album, The Plastic Constellations have already got themselves in check. Even Mazatlan's most sophomoric tunes avoid monotony and are executed without a hitch. "East Cleveland" motors by in a curt 2\xBD minutes, barely taking a breather between abrupt section changes, and yet still manages to deliver an anthemic chorus and a soaring bridge. In fact, The Plastic Constellations make a valiant effort to resurrect that sadly neglected element of effective, sophisticated pop music, bearing a bucketful of robust enjoinders.
As chic as the guitar work and complex song structures may be, though, Mazatlan's most immediately winning quality is its abundance of anthemic choruses. Even if the band weren't so technically proficient, their lapses would be highly forgivable; The Plastic Constellations are easy to rally around, and their lyrics often hammer home their preciously of-the-moment aesthetic. On opener "We Came to Play", a febrile first verse gives way to the chorus lyric, "We wrote this/ And laced up our shoes/ We came to play/ It's what we do."
Such exuberance, while often obnoxious in less musically apposite contexts, suffuses Mazatlan, providing its relentless lifeblood. The lyrical onslaught is constant and unwavering, thanks to a tasteful array of rhythmic vocal harmonizing, often triple-tracked and never cloying. Lesser bands might spend a decade trying to get to this point, only to find themselves already washed up, but The Plastic Constellations make it look easy, and seem ready for more.
