PAS/CAL are quick to please, but they sure take their sweet time revealing the full extent of their pleasures. The Detroit septet had an indie pop hit off their very first EP, 2003's The Handbag Memoirs, with sunny, urbane "The Bronze Beached Boys (Come on Let's Go)" eventually soundtracking a Saturn advertisement. Two more EPs, five years, and countless delayed release dates later, PAS/CAL's full-length debut, I Was Raised on Matthew, Mark, Luke & Laura, does Electric Light Orchestra baroqueness, Of Montreal schizophrenia, and Belle & Sebastian to rival any of its short-playing predecessors. You could go out tonight, but every stitch you'd have to wear is sewn into the music's eccentric finery.
The people in PAS/CAL's songs would probably prefer just to stay in, anyway. An outsider's anthem from the outset, "Glorious Ballad of the Ignored" starts with a false start before touting the future prospects of "the ugly ones, made fun of," amid piano, strings, lush harmonies, and sophisticated time-signature changes. "You're not pretty like so many girls are pretty," frontman Casimer Pascal sings on "O My Cherry", the third track in a three-track suite of organ-psych bridging Stereolab and the Zombies. She isn't informed or well-read, either. "Oh, honey, we're ridiculous, like the overweight or the crippled/ Like, there are nasty names for people like us," Pascal acknowledges on "O Honey We're Ridiculous", which comes one letter short of the title of (but does not appear on) second PAS/CAL EP Oh Honey, We're Ridiculous.
"I'll go to the floor for you," that one concludes; these characters may stay in, but you get the feeling they at least know some good ways to spend their time there. Opener "The Truth Behind All The Vogues She Sold" pairs a 15-year-old girl and a pervert over intricately off-kilter piano. Probably no coincidence the next track is "You Were Too Old for Me", hyperactive and handclapping. "Everyone needs someone they can pray to," Pascal sings, and it's not a stretch to imagine this prayer could be like Madonna's. Stripping oneself bare is "the fashion of the season" on "Summer Is Almost Here", originally released on a split 12" with New York's La Laque. "You're wrong and you know it/ To leave it hidden under a myriad of clothes," Pascal admonishes on the album's crowning, closing track, the darkly XTC-like "Citizens Army Uniform", originally intended-- with good reason-- as the title number (it also updates and expands upon the 2006 Dear Sir EP's appropriately wispier "C.A.U. (Sans Muscle)").
If nerd-rock and subtle kinks don't do it, the sheer sound of I Was Raised... should. Taking seven years to make an album may be decadent, but it's a decadence intrinsic to PAS/CAL's music, executed with an attention to detail uncommon in the often-slapdash world of indie pop. You can expose your soul through your clothes, even if they hide your body; this group's raiment ranges from the whistling and scratchy guitars of "We Made Our Way, We Amtrakked" to the lavish orchestration of "Dearest Bernard Levine" or the Byrdsian jangle, ghostly male-female harmonies, and outer-space synths of the Suite Cherry suite. "We're willing to die for/ What some people won't blink an eye for," Pascal sings on the opener, which could be another way of saying "art for art's sake."
That doesn't mean the arrangements don't sometimes overwhelm the songs. But such excess is part of the songs. Overstatement becomes PAS/CAL: "Even Christ got hung up on the early-thirties blues," Pascal observes near the end of the Suite Cherry suite, in one of the song's most grandiose metaphors. And then, as it is written in the book of Matthew-- or perhaps Laura: "La la la la la la."
