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Review:
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I admit to be a little late to the Nada Surf
resurgence party. I think I heard about this album when it was
released earlier this year. Like many people I thought “Nada
Surf? They’re still around? Weird.” I remembered liking Popular,
their one-hit radio song from 1996 their debut album High/Low,
and I think I owned a copy of it at one time. But by the time
Let Go was released the band had drifted so far
into the recesses of my consciousness that I didn’t really register
the event. It was just one of those oddities that appear on
new release lists every now and then, like this month’s Local
H CD.
Then a month or so ago, I was chatting with Christiano, one
of the graphic designers at work, discussing music and film
and such. I had turned him on to The
Postal Service a few weeks earlier, beginning a cycle of
general geekery. Eventually he asked me if I’d heard the new
Nada Surf. I said no and he gave me his copy to listen to. I
owe him something very good in return.
Let Go, simply put, is an astoundingly good listen.
It is near-perfect indie-pop. The Blizzard of ’77 opens
with gently strummed guitars backing Matthew Caws slightly melancholic
vocals. The song’s nominal metaphor, a blizzard, reflects the
general mood of the song, even while Caws’ lyrics slow-dance
along sometimes mysterious, almost non-linear streams of consciousness.
The sweetness of the guitars and voice blunts the song’s innate
sadness, but the lyrics themselves recreate the deep winter’s
mood; “I know I have got a negative edge, that’s why I sharpen
all the others a lot. It’s like flowers, or ladybugs, pretty
weeds or red beetles with dots. But in the middle of the night,
I worry. It’s blurry even without light.”
Immediately after that, you’re dumped into the misleadingly
upbeat Happy Kid, complete with another addictive guitar
hook. Again Caws wraps a pointy object up in goose down comforting:
“I’m just a happy kid, stuck with the heart of a sad punk. Drowning
in my id, always searching like it’s own junk. No matter who
I hang out with, I can hear the clack-clunk, of the chins that
pull the cars up the roller coaster mountain top so high…”
This is quality music on every level. Like all truly great
pop songwriting, sweetness and bitterness nestle together, intertwining
in both word and music, hinting at jagged edges and emotional
cliffs just out of sight, heartbreak and joy swirling just below
the surface, a bardic undertow that continually drags the listener
back in. The entire album works that magic almost perfectly.
Track three, Inside of Love actually manages to make
having sex with lots of different people seem like a depressing
thing. Track six turns clubbing to soul music into an exercise
of meaningless superficiality while refusing to allow your head
to stop bouncing. The album as a whole puts the listener on
a chair rail, rocking you into pop-nibbanic oblivion by alternating
between near-acoustic set pieces and mid-tempo rock numbers.
The disc’s only slight falter is track ten, La Pour Ca,
a song sung entirely in French. It’s actually a very pretty
song, and quite probably a bone tossed to the band’s European
fans (which was their saving grace between 1996 and now.) It’s
not so much a falter as an unexpected treat, but it is an odd
sound to hear that deep into an otherwise straight pop record.
With that said, I think Leg Go is an incredible
album. It reminds me a lot of the work of Trip Shakespeare cum
Semisonic, but neither incarnation of that band ever produced
this complete of a work (though 1998’s Feeling Strangely
Fine might come close) and I’m going to give it a full
seven sponges. Much like the similarly titled, similarly themed
Give Up,
I find myself listening to this disc over and over again, and
it has yet to get even the slightest bit old. I owe Christiano
something worthwhile in return. (I wonder if he’s heard the
new New Pornographers…)
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