My wife's grandmother is afflicted with advanced Alzheimer's disease. It's devastating to watch the disease take its snowballing toll, as the faces around her become less familiar, and recent events fail to take hold. It's as though her memories are being erased in reverse order, leaving only her childhood. The disease also eventually robs the sufferer of contemporary coherence, as sentences unravel before they've had a chance to even come together, which makes it all the more fascinating that she remembers, with astonishing thoroughness, the words and melodies to hundreds of popular songs from her youth and is able to sing them clearly and accurately. The music she grew up with was certainly memorable-- the AABA forms and gracefully sculpted melodies of the Gershwin and Porter songbooks, Tin Pan Alley showtunes, traditional hymns and Vaudeville numbers-- but that it's remained with her even as everything else fades never ceases to amaze me.
The thing I've noticed about most of the songs she sings is that the words themselves aren't particularly memorable-- it's actually the melodies that give them weight in her mind. Indeed, many of the words might have even been interchangeable with other verses set to the same music back in the day, and who remembers words on their own terms? The average person could likely sing you hundreds of songs, but how many Tennyson and Byron or even Ogden Nash poems do think they could recite on command? I don't think it's any secret that good melodies make mundane words ring somehow more meaningful with us-- check "Yesterday" for a good example-- but the fact is still endlessly fascinating.
Since we've mentioned The Beatles, we might as well steer this thing where it's ultimately going, to an obvious disciple of theirs, one Chris Richards, a Canadian power-pop practitioner who makes especially good use of the power of melody to carry words that wouldn't read well on a page deep into our psychological recesses. Take "Don't Forget About Love", for instance, which is a damn fine, sing-along-the-first-time heap of harmonies and ringing guitars that manages to make a line like this seem life-affirming: "Can't you see?/ Woo hoo hoo/ Baby's with me." Is it the way Richards' nasal voice draws out the first syllable of "baby" that makes it work so well? The way the subtle backward guitars squirm just under the surface? Is "who cares?" an acceptable answer? Because I'm just excited that it works, and Richards sounds like he is, too.
Aside from a clutch of 13 knockout melodies and harmonies sweeter than dried mango, it's little things like that downplayed wash of backward guitar on "Don't Forget About Love" that really elevate Mystery Spot beyond a possible fate as just another Killer B's (think Beatles, Beach Boys, Byrds, Burrito Brothers...) homage. The whole album sounds great, in fact, the production ringing with clarity, but not overdone or slick. Richards backs up every rubber cement vocal with a catchy guitar part, and the tandem is tastefully backed by understated backing by a small cast of skilled friends. The opening pair of songs are two of the most ingratiating, as opener "Is There Anybody Else?" sinks its hooks in immediately with a charging guitar riff and backs it up with a massive chorus.
Really, though, the quality is pretty uniform across the album, and though almost all of it-- including the pedal steel-tinged ballads-- could be easily summed up with references to ringing guitars, buoyant harmonies, killer hooks and infectious energy, that doesn't give proper credit to how well the songs are differentiated and how memorable each is on its own terms. Indeed, Richards has been incubating these songs for quite some time now, and his patience makes for one cherry bomb of a debut.
On return trips from visiting grandma Kuzmickus, I sometimes wonder what songs from my youthful halcyon days I'll be able to sing for my grandkids one day, and just how ridiculous a cappella renditions of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and "Get Out of My Dreams (Get Into My Car)" will sound. I'm not saying Chris Richards is Cole Porter or even close, but it's not too hard to imagine "Your First Mistake" or "Gracefully" standing up in the memory banks even as other things fade, and on a record like this, that's the highest compliment.
