If you're anything like me, you're charming and remarkably virile and have fond memories of a time when American record stores still carried British weeklies like the NME. There was a time back then, in this imported Brit-indie world, when Alan McGee seemed incredibly important. He ran Creation Records back when people still wanted rock labels to be legendary: he signed My Bloody Valentine and the Jesus and Mary Chain. He also signed Oasis, who bankrolled his massive drug habit for quite a while; after that he got really into soccer, palled around with Prime Minister Tony Blair, sold Creation, and went off to start a new label called Poptones.
Lush were important, too: they gave hilarious interviews to the weeklies, lent guitars to Kevin Shields, and hung out with the Cocteau Twins. They started off making shimmery shoegazer records and then gradually turned to making shimmery Britpop records, and just when something commercial started happening, their drummer killed himself. The others, understandably, went off for a while as well, and now one of them-- guitar player Emma Anderson-- is back, on Alan McGee's new label. No surprise: they were part of the same changing game.
As were a lot of the folks on The Joy of Sing-Sing, which is like a collision of Anderson's and singer Lisa O'Neill's friends. Emma borrows former members from shoegazers Moonshake and Slowdive spin-off Mojave 3; O'Neill, of slightly more recent pedigrees, escorts members of the Departure Lounge and the more ambient Locust. Sing-Sing's first single was even released by Cocteau Twin Robin Guthrie's Bella Union imprint. What this supergroup of the vaguely dated are assembled to do is the same pretty ambitious thing you get from high-gloss, tech-savvy acts from Goldfrapp to Garbage, and the same thing you get from shoegazers-gone-pop like The Verve or Mercury Rev or that disappointing last Lush album: Sing-Sing are using the whole run of studio technology to make a tight, interesting, and great-sounding pop record.
What's surprising, in this instance, is that this down-the-center approach to ambitiously arranged pop gives the group a ton of room to pack in a refreshingly wide variety of ideas. The obvious bases get covered: the fizzy swagger of Curve, or the slick trip-hop loops of however million Monos and Hooverphonics swarmed across the late 90s. But then the band's off elsewhere: swinging rhythms and hyper-sunny harmonies on the Stereolabby "Far Away from Love", shiny futuristic Motown on "Feels Like Summer", late-period Lush ambience on "Underage". Anderson even goes full-scale on her long-standing pull toward saccharine 80s pop, turning "Panda Eyes"-- a Lush song if I've ever heard one-- into the sort of dreamily pulsing, synth-heavy number you might imagine coming either from a Corey Haim movie or the Darling Buds. The spirit of 4AD-- Lush's label, the label that turned the word "ethereal" into a critical staple-- makes a number of visits: O'Neill, who both sings and writes melodies disturbingly like Shelleyan Orphan's Caroline Crawley, invites the comparison directly on a few arty crooners. *
All of which could easily have been the dullest, nicely produced thing in the world, if not for the fact that the songs are remarkably good. This, actually, was the whole glory of Americans listening to British rock bands as "indie" in our sense of the word: as opposed to the raw, grotty rockers slouching around the U.S., the Brits were honestly trying to write fabulous perfect pop singles that would get them on the cover of Melody Maker or on "Top of the Pops". Which is what The Joy of Sing-Sing delivers, more or less-- the pair's melodic turns are all pop, consistently sharp, and oddly fresh-sounding, and the structures of the arrangements are clever and sophisticated enough to spend a decent amount of time picking through.
Making a great big shiny pop/rock record: sometimes it seems like everyone is trying to do it, and sometimes it seems like everyone is too much of a wimp to try. Right now seems a little like the latter-- so the fact that this album occasionally sounds like it's competing with 1995 Britpop flashes like Echobelly and Sleeper seems more like adorable charm than grounds for dismissal. If Starsailor and Coldplay are what popular British indie bands have come to, a little nostalgia isn't out of order, and Sing-Sing, Black Box Recorder, and the still-brilliant Pulp can be forgiven a whole lot.
Granted, if you're one for history, you could find it a useless little anachronism. But even if it turns out to be an incredibly useless thing, it would be churlish to pretend that it's not the best little useless thing it can possibly be. Sing-Sing have made a sharp, simple record that will change absolutely nothing.
