Elvis Costello has said that pop music isn't an elephant charging directly at you; it's more like water, running unpredictably in all directions. What he means, I think, is that the current of popular culture doesn't flow in a straight line; it rolls into little tributaries and unpredictable whirlpools without any regard to what we'd like its direction to be. With all the late-60's hero-worship going on these days, this might be something we'll want to keep in mind.
Of course, the Minders might disagree. Like their spiritual godfathers, the Apples (in Stereo), the genial Portland collective make four-track-recorded symphonies, clearly indebted to the Beatles and Beach Boys. As if the history of popular music could be represented as one of those monkey-to-man charts where the subject in question starts out knuckle-dragging and hairy and ends up straight-postured and clean-shaven. To Martyn Leaper, the Minders' guiding light, it's pretty apparent that the collective personage of Lennon, McCartney and Wilson represents the pinnacle of human evolution, and anything that steps too far off the path of their particular beliefs runs the risk of turning into something completely alien-- like if you don't have massed harmonies, elaborate arrangements, and sweetly naïve lyrics about love and loss, you're not really human anymore.
This is, of course, a patently extreme way of putting things, but that doesn't mean it's not a little bit true. Over the Minders' assembled body of work, they've only really developed a single idea. Their debut, Hooray for Tuesday, was sweet and goofy chamber-pop with a few modern touches thrown in, and the following collection of demos and old singles indicated that Leaper's heart had been set on such sugary confections from the get-go. Golden Street is a slightly more complex recitation of exactly the same values, and, if you don't mind setting the Wayback Machine every time you turn on your CD player, it's a pretty nice way to spend an afternoon.
The trouble, though, is that there's not much new to be unearthed here. According to Costello's Elephant Principle, the Minders want very badly to be exactly in the path of what they perceive as being the single direction popular music is evolving in. Having hitched their aesthetic wagons to a single horse, they no longer seem to feel what they're doing. Instead, Leaper and his band of pals (which includes current Jick Joanna Bolme) have chosen a specific vocabulary for what they do, and they're more than content to ride the angle out as far as it will take them.
What's more unfortunate about Golden Street is that it's clearly more restrained and traditional than any of the band's previous outings. The best moment on Tuesday was, by far, the funny transition between "Bubble," an oddly minimal instrumental for bass drum and guitar, and the relatively epic closer, "Frieda." There's little of that kind of experimentation on Golden Street, as the band just try to write as many Pet Sounds-era gems as they can before their well of inspiration runs dry. Unfortunately, without the deep, intuitive commitment to sound Brian Wilson had, the Minders end up sounding rote and a little bit straightjacketed. Whereas the Beach Boys' finest moments came out of tossing the rulebook they'd been handed in the past, the Minders are so committed to following their ancestors that they can't find anywhere for their own more idiosyncratic moments to fit.
This kind of rigid formalism is unfortunate, because Leaper's a very talented songwriter: he has a way with a hook, and the mannered arrangements are modestly compelling. But because everything here has been done somewhere else-- and by someone driven to create a sound they could only hear in their head-- we don't get the same thrill out of listening that Leaper got out of writing. Instead, it sounds like he's lashed himself to an elephant that can't possibly change direction however much it wants to. If the rest of us have to put up with the more confusing rivulets and rivers that get produced by the pop-music-as-water metaphor, we're still better off. At least we're given the occasional pleasure of being genuinely surprised.
