Alright, I'm confused-- where does "emo" end? At first, the term seemed mainly limited to whiny hardcore bands, but now the term gets thrown around about Bright Eyes, Hot Hot Heat, and just about any band that expresses human emotion. If the spread of the term isn't contained in short order, everything aside from Kraftwerk and Cabaret Voltaire will be reducible to a three-letter word. Fuck that noise. There's a time and place for emotion in music-- sometimes (and I realize how revolutionary this sounds) even for the cloying, overbearing kind. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Although The Velvet Teen tend to play heavy on the emotional drama (courtesy of Judah Nagler's overwhelming falsetto) and shallow on actual substance, they display a knack for occasionally pulling themselves out of that emotional filth and into something approximating true sincerity without the slightest hint of forcing it. Or, at least, they used to; the now out-of-print Comasynthesis and Great Beast February EPs from The Velvet Teen's early days (i.e. the days before the release of their only other album, Out of the Fierce Parade) are proof. The vast, aimless compositions and iron-fisted emotional pomp that hamstrung their debut are in their embryonic stages here, but haven't yet become the crushing dead weight they later would.
Come back with me, won't you? You see, in their formative prehistory, before they adopted the sound of a soporific Radiohead cliché, they were easily referenced somewhere between the late, oft-remembered Velocity Girl and Death Cab for Cutie on the handy-dandy indie rock influence-o-meter. These EPs see the Teen vacillating between superball tempos and jangling riffs, and sonic Nyquil, courtesy of soothing electronics and a comparatively spare dose of Judah Nagler's baby grand. And even though they never find a way to put much musical distance between themselves and their ancestry, the homage is always faithful. In particular, the gorgeous opening one-two of "Naked Girl" and "Counting Backwards" summon forth hooks of fearsome potency-- pop can rarely equal the mind-expanding ecstasy of Velocity Girl's "My Forgotten Favorite" or "Sorry Again", but these two are half a candyflip away.
They slow things down with ease, as well, as the surreal dream-lounge of "Super Me" demonstrates, but what ultimately kills the early buzz of the Plus Minus Equals collection is a lack of focus. Between focusing on their primary reference points, The Velvet Teen veers off to include some of the piano-heavy Radiohead bites they'll later dwell on, to mixed effect, and one isolated, absolutely obscene attempt at Dismemberment Plan emulation, entitled "Never Happy".
If it sounds as though The Velvet Teen are guilty of nothing more impressive than a semi-random assortment of musical appropriations, you'd be right in terms of the music. But it's Judah Nagler's voice that saves the day (no pun intended). Folks may bristle at the wearying pomp of his Yorkian falsetto, and I'll admit that the melodramatic sentimentality of it can be stifling, but the EPs on Plus Minus Equals never allow it to become overbearing. Besides, he's a talented vocalist in the classical sense, and lack of subtlety or not, it alone is capable of distancing these songs from their obvious influences and bringing everything together beautifully.
