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| The Word Nerdy |
 By: Orr |
Sometimes, but not too often, the circuit driven grind of umpteen electronic dance tracks just plain wears me out. Not just the music itself with its relentless grooves and pounding drums, but also the culture that goes with it. You get tired of the endless cataloging of obscure tracks and affirmations of, “only one hundred pressed in a tool shed in Outer Mongolia, but it was reviewed in XLR8R last week and you gotta get it ‘cos Dieter Schnubenhausen is playing it with other minimal tracks. I heard it on a podcast from Frankfurt over the weekend.” Blah, blah, blah. The word “nerdy’ comes to mind for sure, but then you add the endless party politics that go with it, and you just want to take some time out to listen to an album like Arrivals and Departures by The Icicles.
Just by looking at the cover, and taking in the band and album name, you can sense that this is going to an infectious dollop of sugary and perfect indie pop. Well, that’s exactly what this album is. The Icicles are a four girl, one boy, band from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Arrival and Departures is their second album. Their first, A Hundred Patterns, wowed listeners and some ad execs at Motorola, who used the single, “Sugar Sweet,” in a national campaign. So they have gained the approval of the man, but when you hear the first track on this album you’ll be nodding in approval too. In fact you won’t be nodding, you’ll be shaking your heading vigorously as “Crazy” floats in on a wave of jangly guitar, girly vocals, little touches of keyboard, a bouncy, snakey bass line and vocals about having a big, silly, stupefying and nerve wracking crush. What better way to kick off an album?
The Icicles sound like they are channeling the spirits of Camera Obscura, early Go Gos, the Undertones, Shangri-Las and Buzzcocks all at once. Just when you’ve gotten over the sugar rush in overdrive of the first song, the band double whammy you with “La Ti Da,” with its devastatingly hooky chorus of “And I say la ti da ti da ah ha, and I say la ti da ah ha…” Track three, “Regret” rolls in on a bouncy bassline, skittering drums and washes of sixties inflected keyboards. After that, “Gedge’s Song,” turns down the tempo and intensity but is no less impressive with its mellow, shuffling guitar driven groove, lyrics about getting out to play in the neighborhood and lines like “Just can’t wait to go out and make friends with the other little creatures around the bend. See how well-behaved I am when I’m out in the neighborhood with my friends.” Cute, but not cutesy, this is the Icicles in a nutshell.
And if songs about chasing fireflies, being out in nature, hanging out with your best friends and having mad crushes appeals to the inner teenager in you, well the rest of this album may be the sonic poultice to bring all that out of your cynical, skeptical older self. They even have a song called “Snowbird,” and it bears no resemblance to the namesake by Anne Murray, but is infectious, and perfect. That’s pretty much all I can say about this giddy and addictive eleven track opus, except that it’s on a label called Microindie and is out on April 10th, just in time for early spring, which is when an album of this ilk should be released. Get out and get it for warm days, so you can soundtrack your daydreams.
Again I’m out. And some buddies and I are starting a new club night at the Cellar on Sutter and Taylor. The party is called “Oui,” and will be happening on first and third Wednesdays of the month. We’ll be playing whatever we want and rocking the party with it. Come through to our first night March 7th, if you like dancing hard to really good records from a gang of genres.
Orr
http://www.discogs.com/label/Microindie+Records
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=7148485
http://www.discogs.com/artist/Buzzcocks
http://www.discogs.com/artist/Camera+Obscura
http://www.discogs.com/artist/Undertones,+The
http://www.discogs.com/artist/Anne+Murray
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