Album titles can become goldmines of unintended significance. Music critics jump at the opportunity to prove the name of an album is indicative of the band itself, or the songs contained within, or some radical turn the band has taken. It's like overzealous comparative lit majors who forge half-baked relationships between two entirely incongruous pieces of work: "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation was clearly informed by 12th century cave paintings of vegetarian mating rituals in South India." Ah, the Liberal Arts.
We've endured a the Strokes jabs-- "No, seriously, is this it? I mean it, like, is it really?"-- or my personal favorite Microphones catcall-- "It was hot, we stayed in the water...and sucked!" Sometimes the album title is relevant to content, but all too often, these analogies are wrenched beyond reason for the sake of some pithy introduction.
So humor me for second. If there were any pop band out there today "built on squares," the Starlight Mints would probably be the last you'd suspect. A square is simple, unchallenging, and utterly honest; this quirky Oklahoma ensemble, with its bizarre lyrics to its unconventional pop instrumentation, is the furthest thing from equal sides and right angles.
Pop music in a strict sense, however, is very square and very simple. Ultimately, it breaks down to verse and chorus. Our reaction to it is not intelligent or analytical but visceral: we like the way it sounds, and we often judge pop based on how we feel when we listen to it, not how cleverly we see the chords fitting together or why the composer chose to follow one particular note with another. What drives pop music thex96 and what makes it so intriguing as an artform-- is the challenge of crafting (e.g. intellectualizing) a truly visceral experience. In the most timeless pop music-- and perhaps timeless music in general-- there is a symbiotic relationship between the song's visceral immediacy and the depth of its inner workings. The latter preserves the former, while the former makes the latter relevant.
Immediacy is no hard thing to come by in pop music these days-- saccharine hooks are a dime a dozen. The task in front of today's pop musicians is to maintain immediacy, but to make that physical immediacy "interesting" too, which is purely on an intellectual level. The most rudimentary elements of pop-- its squares-- must be rearranged for the sake of the genre itself.
Not to bill them as the saviors of pop, but the Starlight Mints-- in a vein similar to the Decemberists or the mid-90s Cardigans-- are doing just that. Built on Squares finds the band writing enjoyable and refreshingly interesting pop songs: all eleven tracks are fun, catchy and well-conceived, making this very much the logical progression from 2001's The Dream That Stuff Was Made Of. The Mints avoid the pitfall of using variety of instruments as a gimmicky substitute for carefully considered song writing, and what results is an album that comes off natural and effortless, rooted firmly in the squares of pop, where even its orchestro-pop embellishments from violin to trombone to bowling pins at the beginning of "Irene" seem uncontrived.
After the opener "Black Cat", peppered with quirky string arrangements at its beginning and throughout, the catchy quasi-country romp "Brass Digger" bops around, replete with a Cake-like mariachi trumpet, blues harmonica and Alan Vest's oddball lyrics. "From the Brooklyn train to the other everglades, have you ever met a rat named the Brass Digger?" As if rats weren't bizarre enough subject matter, the spacey rocker that follows ("Goldstar") has Vest detailing a run-in with a woman "kinky like a girl from Mars" who tries to shoot him with the mysterious "goldstar gun."
"Irene" is perhaps most indicative of the band's ability to conflate a wide range of seemingly incongruous influences and instrumentations, and from these elements to produce something entirely graceful and original. Fuzz bass, horn lines reminiscent of The Price Is Right, skittering Casiotone twitches, and balls-out AC/DC guitar riffs coexist harmoniously as the kitschy female voice floats atop the mix, singing the 50s bubblegum-ish "You make my world spin 'round." For its remarkable depth and business, "Irene" never chokes on its own complexity. It is a testament to the meticulous production of Built on Squares, which undoubtedly aspired to instruments not dominating each other in the mix.
It is at once easy and difficult to speak of the Starlight Mints' influences, easy because they are immediately recognizable, difficult because there are so many of them. The album's latter half alone, for instance, features the Weezer-like lilt of "Zillion Eyes", a blatant aping of the Kinks' riff from "All Day and All of the Night" in "Jack In The Squares", and Vest's Bowie-like tremolo in "Jimmy Cricket". The Starlight Mints in this sense walk the fine line between sounding like no other band and like every other band before them. Such concerns, however, are neither here nor there when the album is within an earshot; Built on Squares is the fun and catchy work of talented pop musicians, writing terribly interesting songs without compromising pop's essential, visceral lure.
