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Portastatic returns with a disarming indie masterpiece 7 May 2003
The new album from Portastatic can be a little hard to get to know, like a person who very consciously refrains from burnishing off their rough edges or stylizing their persona to accommodate social expectations—but whose gentleness intrigues you. Well, that’s my kind of person and yes, this is my kind of record—its rewards more than make up for the time you have to invest in it. On The Summer Of The Shark there’s a bounty of immediately inviting sounds and lyrical images. On the other hand, Ralph 'Mac' McCaughan, the disarmingly gentle master behind this Superchunk side project (and co-owner of Merge Records), arranges these tasty musical elements in quirky and bemusing, if not offputting, ways. At least this is so on first blush. The opening gambit on Portastatic’s first studio LP in six years is a duet between McCaughan and Sleater-Kinney’s Janet Weiss that bounces among straight-ahead folk-rock, melodic indie-pop, merseybeat, Dinosaur-Jr-esque noise-rock, and back. Kinda leaves your head spinning. The seams, while elegant, do show, but once you get to know this song they transmute into just another of many unexpected elements that combine to make it so cool. The good news is that if you can make it through track one, titled Oh Come Down, you’ll be just fine for the rest of this eclectic and iconoclastic, and ultimately very uplifting, LP. Track two, In The Lines, pairs spacey electronics with guitar for a sad and slow tale about a lost friend. Track three, Windy Village, stands as one of three punky rockers on this disc. It’s the first one on the album that might meet your expectations if you love McCaughan’s work with Superchunk, such as their nonstop-energy set No Pocky For Kitty. When young rockers age they seem to go in one of two directions. They get embarrasingly lame (Jefferson Starship, Eric Clapton) or they keep growing and bring their expanded internal horizons to light in their music (Neil Young, Dean Wareham, Robyn Hitchcock). McCaughan, who set American college radio on fire in the early ’90s with Superchunk’s neo-punk, very definitely belongs in the latter camp. From the quiet and poignant Paratrooper to the experimental and evocative Swimming Through Tires, from the chilly, Departure-Lounge-like instrumental Through A Rainy Lens to the beautiful and romantic Hey Salty, The Summer Of The Shark is an ever-surprising journey filled with twists and turns. Another surprising aspect of this disc is the sound quality. McCaughan taped most of the bits in his home studio, but the acoustical detail and the balance are impeccable. Now, I’ve all but given up on commercial radio, which is sad but there you go. But there’s one song on this disc that is so damn, horribly infectious (damn you, Mr. Portastatic, I cannot get it out of my head) that I can almost imagine the over-fed executives at Clear Channel picking it for rotation. That song is Noisy Night, and the one that follows on the record, Clay Cakes, would make the perfect B-side follow-up. So in my imagination there are kids in cars blasting out Noisy Night from their radios (“When next April comes around/ And you feel the stiffness go out of this town/ What will change? Who will engage these summer currents? ’Cause you know I’m down”) and the world is a slightly nicer place. | Portastatic | | Portastatic on Merge Records | | CD from Amazon.com | | top of page | |
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