Frontman side projects are notoriously disastrous, but Superchunk's Mac McCaughan is clever enough to consistently pull off Portastatic, his ever-self-modifying alter ego. The guise has long provided him an outlet for his more experimental urges, offering shifting band lineups, quirky narrative devices, and an undemocratic opportunity for him to orchestrate loads of unpredicted blips.
McCaughan's latest release, Autumn Was a Lark, was initially conceived as a five-song companion EP to Portastatic's last full-length, April's Summer of the Shark, but has since been plumped up to include no less than nine live-and-acoustic "bonus tracks." The result is a jumble of seemingly arbitrary Portastatic tracks: some are new, some are old, some were recorded on-air at college stations, some are covers, and some are just weird (e.g. the desperate early-morning voicemail left on McCaughan's machine).
Rounded out by a handful of tour-tested covers (Badfinger's "Baby Blue", Ronnie Lane's "One for the Road", and two Springsteen tracks, "Bobby Jean" from Born in the USA and Asbury Park's "Growin' Up") alongside a full-band version of Summer of the Shark's subdued "In the Lines", Autumn ultimately sports only one brand new Portastatic song: the surprisingly raucous "Autumn Got Dark".
Swallowed whole, Autumn Was a Lark can seem sonically disjointed, but it's also an apt representation of Portastatic's ever-roaming muse: the first five tracks see McCaughan ably backed by his touring band (which includes Aaron Oliva on bass and brother Matt on drums and vocals, plus a few guest players), while the closing set has McCaughan accompanied only by his own acoustic guitar strums (which may explain his insistence that this half of the record be called a "bonus").
The division is necessary: based solely on Autumn's opening romp, it might seem like the once-evident aesthetic lines separating Superchunk from Portastatic have completely blurred-- gone are the quirky keyboards and string experiments that distinguished early Portastatic records from the more straightforward, guitar-heavy Superchunk-- but taken in the context of the album's latter half, it becomes clear that Portastatic is more about fiddling with all available methods than establishing aural consistency.
Opener "Autumn Got Dark" hollers back to Summer of the Shark, both lyrically ("So much for the summer of the shark/ Autumn got dark so fast") and thematically (as the band explains in the album's liner notes, both songs lament "a place where just when you think the world's fallen apart, you realize that maybe everything's about to get even worse"). With a distorted wallop of a guitar riff, "Autumn Got Dark" is an unexpected elegy to September 11th, easily Portastatic's most self-consciously "rock" song to date, and a cut that lacks, almost entirely, any explicit traces of melancholia. The results are compelling: chilling in its rowdiness, "Autumn Got Dark" reveals the kind of unfettered glee that goes hand-in-hand with having nothing left to lose.
The live radio cuts are effectively raw, McCaughan's impassioned caw rising and falling with his whims, and serve as a potent counterpart to the more heavily produced studio tracks (especially "You Know Where to Find Me") also available here. The covers are fairly faithful to their originals, and always enthusiastically rendered, if a little underwhelming.
Considered in conjunction with Superchunk's latest offering, August's B-sides, singles, and rarities double-disc extravaganza Cup of Sand, it might seem like McCaughan has spent the better part of his late summer and early fall hocking all the crap buried deep inside his closet. Happily, this particular pile of clutter is worth keeping around.
