Fergus & Geronimo take their name from the rival youth factions in the 1994 Irish film War of the Buttons. It's a choice of nomenclature that fits indie's recent obsession with childhood and nostalgia, as does the album cover art. Yet when you open the CD edition of Unlearn, you're greeted with the following message printed on the disc: "You still buy CDs?"
That arch, slightly confrontational humor extended to their performance at the 2010 CMJ showcase hosted by fellow Texan, blogger Gorilla vs. Bear. F&G were in full snark mode, sarcastically toasting the event's sponsors (and the blog conglomerates that love them), jibing at trust-fund Brooklyn man-babies, and (in the case of one member) wearing a "Free O.J. Simpson" t-shirt. This sense of dismissal carries over to Unlearn, where the band fires shots at neo-crunch yuppies ("Where the Walls Are Made of Grass"), baby boomers (the appropriately titled "Baby Boomer/Could You Deliver"), and music critics ("Wanna Know What I Would Do?").
All in all, they're pretty fucking funny when they want to be, but this isn't so much "joke music" as "music with jokes." Kelly and Savage claim inspiration from Sparks, another duo with arch humor and serious chops. While there are precious few glam-rock moves involved with F&G, the connection to the brothers Mael holds some spiritual water. Whereas Sparks tended to shift melodic motifs within songs like a Rube Goldberg contraption, Kelly and Savage refuse to stay stylistically still throughout Unlearn, drawing from doo-wop, British folk, garage rock, and the easy jangle of the Who's less incendiary moments.
If it all sounds like a little much, that's because it kind of is-- don't come to this record expecting cohesion or form; you're not going to find much of it here. It's worth charging through Unlearn's varied territory, though, for the smoldering strummer "Forced Aloha", as well as the closing track, in which vocalist Elyse Shrock testifies in spoken word over a warm, 1950s pop song structure about rebelling against authority and refusing to "[bow] to their cross." It's a clever move to couch such countercultural statements within a musical template known for buttoned-up formalism. But its deeper appeal is that it's earwormy enough to take a casual listener multiple go-rounds to pick up on that.
