Negotiating fad is a tricky business. What happens when your brand of fuzzed-out, retro garage rock catches major media attention? When similarly coifed Lou Reed fans are fitted for rotation on MTV? Are you awarded special regard for your prescience, or seen, erroneously or no, as cliché? Do you sink or swim?
The predominance of critically acclaimed retro rock bands this year is an undeniable advantage to comparative veterans like Seattle's Love as Laughter. The smirking suggestions of stadium rock and bluesy, Jagger-esque swagger on Sea to Shining Sea ensures some success in a scene increasingly predominated by bands shedding their 90s no-pretense shtick in favor of rock star posturing.
But Sea to Shining Sea is more than mere posturing. Sam Jayne and company have turned out a kick-ass record that's rock and roll in every sense of rock and roll. Produced by Unwound's Vern Rumsey and the ubiquitous Phil Ek, the record is a slick, skillful outing camouflaged in gritty, raw production. And Love as Laughter don't waste a second proving it. The opening track, "Coast to Coast," builds from an adrenalized Who-like intro into what may be either one of the best tour songs I've ever heard, or the theme song to a potential Love as Laughter TV series, wherein "like every band on the run/ [they] fight for noise and some fun."
In case you don't get the joke, sly allusions to classic rock mainstays are scattered throughout the album. The guitars in the hyperkinetic ode to paradise lost, "Temptation Island," wink at Led Zeppelin. And "Miss Direction," a bluesy Let It Bleed-inspired sing-along (and pun aside, among the album's best tracks), cleverly appropriates one of Paul Simon's most infamous lyrics.
Some of the better moments deviate from the winking allusions to classic rock history. "Sam Jayne = Dead," reputedly inspired by apocryphal bathroom graffiti at Sam Jayne's day job, has a gritty, off the cuff quality, informed by comparatively spare instrumentation and Jayne's unsettled vocals. Similarly, "E.H.," the album's 10\xBD minute-long closer, builds on a comparatively simple melody with some nice guitar work and fervent vocal delivery.
At its best, Sea to Shining Sea has a dusty, archival aspect; these are songs you'd expect to find hidden in some brilliant but forgotten rock and roll compendium, salvaged after twenty-five years of dust gathering from the backroom of an out of the way record store. There are a couple of misses along the way-- "Drugachusetts," a psychedelic, Eastern-inspired jam, is ambitious, but it leans just a little too much toward kitsch, and "French Heroin," a clumsy Sonic Youth impersonation, suffers as much from seeming essentially out of place on this album as it does from its general mediocrity-- but the accomplishment of the record as a whole largely cancels them out.
The trendmongers and poster boys of 2001 may pass without comment as the next phase of rock revival rears its ugly head. That Sea to Shining Sea conforms to fad undermines its status as a great album, fashion be damned.
