AEM049 You and Your Pointy Ears

In the last few years, the ease of home record­ing has increased expo­nen­tially to the point where every 17 year old with an acoustic gui­tar and a lap­top is now a “band” (I will make fun of these kids for­ever, but I am happy that they exist. I won­der if their chil­dren will unearth their MySpace pages in 30 years). Any­way, as we have got­ten more and more used to hear­ing home record­ings by peo­ple who don’t have much expe­ri­ence in the realm of…well, record­ing, we’ve got­ten more and more used to low fidelity, to every­thing clip­ping.  Lo-fi wasn’t invented by the inter­net gen­er­a­tion, of course, it’s always been a marker of authen­tic­ity and anti-top 40 pop music (think of Daniel John­ston bleat­ing his immensely effec­tive songs of pain into a tape recorder), but we may be the first group of con­sumers to send some kid straight from mak­ing blown out tapes in his base­ment to hav­ing pub­lic drug melt­downs at Euro­pean fes­ti­vals within, what, six months? Low fidelity record­ing is accept­able to a wider swathe of audi­ence than ever before.  Those of us who have grown up lis­ten­ing to stream­ing MySpace mp3s have learned to lis­ten past the blurry audio when nec­es­sary and to appre­ci­ate it as an aes­thetic of both inten­tion and neces­sity. It could even be con­sid­ered a back­lash against the unnat­ural clean­ness and dry­ness of dig­i­tal pro­duc­tion, which removes the warmth of occa­sional tape sat­u­ra­tion of most of our beloved ana­log record­ings and makes it sound like lis­ten­ing to a rock band sus­pended in a vac­uum.  Cam­bridge, MA, band You and Your Pointy Ears, the brain­child of Spenser Gralla (when he’s not busy being in all his other bands) fits neatly into the lo-fi pop cat­e­gory, but instead of the angsty numb­ness of bands like Wavves, You and Your Pointy Ears chan­nels the badass, dance party stomp of old school garage weirdos like The Monks and coun­try rock­ers like CCR.

When I first heard You and Your Pointy Ears, it was late on a Mon­day night at Zuzu, a tiny, red-walled club in Cam­bridge, fre­quented by the ex mem­bers of every great Boston band that we could have sworn was going to blow up but never quite did. These peo­ple all have the author­i­ta­tive and tragic weight of deposed roy­alty as they down bot­tle after golden bot­tle of high life. I was sit­ting at the bar shoot­ing the shit with some­one or other when You and Your Pointy Ears started play­ing, and though I hadn’t come to watch the bands, soon I was stand­ing in the crush around Spenser Gralla and his drum­mer for the night (pre­sum­ably Noah Bond, Gralla’s band­mate from one of his main projects, the rum­bling psych-pop group Doom­star), first nod­ding my head and grin­ning, and soon join­ing every­one else in hop­ping around with beer in hand.  Let me tell you, it was a party.  High lifes were held up high in every hand, foam­ing over their rims and soak­ing coat sleeves, and no one seemed to care.  Every­one just kept dancing.

The thing that makes You and Your Pointy Ears great is this mix of old and new.  You could prob­a­bly lump them in with the unfor­tu­nately named “shitgaze” bands with­out any­one rolling their eyes at your naiveté, but really what You and Your Pointy Ears does is play pop songs that you can dance to but that don’t make you feel like you’re in a jeans com­mer­cial aimed at hip, sub­ur­ban youth.  This is more dif­fi­cult than it sounds.  Pretty much every sin­gle indie rock band aimed at mak­ing dance music sounds either neutered or hideously dated.  Good rock music has to have roots and wings.  Throw­backy bands can catch on for about a year, but they’re always the butt of jokes for the next ten after­wards (Brian Set­zer Orches­tra any­one?), and bands that are too focused on inno­va­tion largely go unlis­tened to, which, when you’re try­ing to make pop music, is sort of a prob­lem.  Gralla’s songs are pretty sim­ple, rooted in a lot of six­ties pop song writ­ing in the same way that, believe it or not, the best Nir­vana songs are. Con­sider the drum break dur­ing the cho­rus of A-side “Under Your Feet”, in which the drums sud­denly drop into that old saw girl group drum beat (as in the first verse of “Leader of the Pack”), or the surf rock dou­ble back­beat on B-side “Night at the Movies” that fol­lows the wicked drum fills out of the sta­tic verse sec­tions and into the cho­ruses, under­scor­ing that last Brian Wilson­ian ooh that hangs out above the crash­ing waves of drums and gui­tar like ocean mist.

“Under Your Feet” is a loose stomp­ing rock and roll song with no wasted moments, exactly the kind of thing You and Your Pointy Ears excels at.  It’s got a slightly bizarre verse chord pro­gres­sion, fol­low­ing those descend­ing barre chords out of the key and then back in, and that madly catchy, repet­i­tive cho­rus that hits the upbeats so hard it feels like it should go tum­bling along for­ever.  Catch the way the bass drum mir­rors the rhythm of the vocals there, cre­at­ing that ten­sion that makes you want to move.  Also, “I love to see you go / but I hate to watch you leave” is an great inver­sion of the old cliché used clev­erly to invoke the kind of mixed feel­ings in rela­tion­ships where you let some­one walk all over you.

B-side “Night at the Movies” kicks in with a lit­tle more elec­tric­ity, going straight into some Walkmen-style all-downstroke strum­ming on the elec­tric, rolling 16^th notes on the rack tom, sleigh bells on the down­beats.  It’s a per­fect tension-release set up for the cho­ruses when the song explodes into that dou­ble back­beat men­tioned above.  It’s some­thing so sim­ple, but so pow­er­ful. The whole verse long you can’t help but wait for it, and then when it finally comes, after that ter­rif­i­cally sav­age drum fill by Bond, it’s so sat­is­fy­ing.  It is, like all great pop songs, a tiny exer­cise in delayed grat­i­fi­ca­tion, and that final falsetto melody is just sublime.

You and Your Pointy Ears has the knack for mak­ing great inde­pen­dent pop music: pop songs that are just weird enough to be inter­est­ing and weird songs that are just poppy enough to get stuck in your head.  This would be enough to make them worth­while on its own, but add to it enough rock n roll blood to make a club full of drunken Boston rock roy­alty get up and shake their asses and a lo-fi aes­thetic that actu­ally mir­rors the feel­ing of being in a tiny dark room and get­ting pul­ver­ized by the enor­mous sound of a rock band play­ing ten feet away and you have a band worth spilling your beer to. I am eagerly await­ing their 2010 full length, but for now at least we have this handy Ampeater 7-inch.

Gabe Birn­baum

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