AEM063 The Paparazzi

The word ‘rococo’ has made a cou­ple of sur­pris­ing appear­ances in hip rock music lately. First as half of the title of a song from Bill Callahan’s fantastic(ally named) 2009 album Some­times I Wish We Were An Eagle, and now as the title of an album by The Paparazzi, the solo project of Erik Paparazzi, who you may know as Cat Power’s cur­rent bassist. It refers to an ornamentation-heavy style of 18th cen­tury art, orig­i­nat­ing in France, which is usu­ally referred to in dic­tio­nary def­i­n­i­tions as “fan­ci­ful” or “gay” (no, really). At first it seems like a strange word to apply to a rock album, but the more I lis­ten to Rococo, the more it makes sense. The songs are so light­hearted on the sur­face that it’s easy to miss out on the end­less series of care­fully crafted hooks, gui­tar lines and arrange­ments that man­age to sound as unla­bored as if the band just made them up on the spot. The addi­tion of lots of lit­tle bits of stu­dio chat­ter (the reverby speech in the mid­dle of “The Rococo Tape” is instantly rec­og­niz­able the band talk­ing about the take they just played) is a clever device that helps keep this loose­ness present and dom­i­nant through­out even the most com­plex songs, though Paparazzi’s yeah-I-can-sing-but-I’m-not-going-to-exert-myself deliv­ery does a lot of the work as well.

In addi­tion to the loose­ness, The Paparazzi’s songs are packed with a humor that comes out in all kinds of unex­pected ways. Paparazzi com­bines a love for puns and word­play that hear­kens back to John Lennon’s early songs with a kind of free-associative non­sen­si­cal style that calls to mind Stephen Malk­mus and gives us bizarre lyrics like “star­ing down a pray­ing man­tis” which are more about the sound of words than their mean­ings. For an exam­ple of the for­mer style, think of the two pos­si­ble read­ings of the tit­u­lar phrase from Lennon’s “Please Please Me” and then check out the Paparazzi line from album-closer “Fall (Into It)” that hinges on the homo­phones of ‘eye’ and ‘I’: “Hey you with the lazy eye don’t care.” It’s word­play for the sake of word­play, but it’s appeal­ingly easy­go­ing. It sounds like Paparazzi is hav­ing a lot of fun here, which means that it’s easy to crack a smile at these lit­tle embell­ish­ments. For another exam­ple, check out Ampeater B-side “Epic Pro­por­tions,” which fea­tures lines like “you’ve got too much class for deten­tion.” The puns go beyond lyrics as well, extend­ing into the titles and arrange­ments, as on the song “Up, Up and Away (Major Scale),” which fea­tures, you guessed it, a key­board part that con­sists solely of the major scale. But if this all sounds like too much, it’s bal­anced by the fact that the songs that carry these lyri­cal games are rock solid, built with an old-school crafts­man­ship and instru­men­tal skill that it’s easy to over­look given how sweetly catchy and sum­mery every­thing sounds. There are a lot of bril­liant lit­tle nods to great pop music of yore: hard-panned gui­tars, nat­ural alter­nat­ing meters (“The Rococo Tape” slips effort­lessly back and forth between 4/4 and 6/4 in a way that reminds me in its unob­tru­sive­ness of the “sun sun sun here it comes” sec­tion of the Bea­t­les’ “Here Comes the Sun,” which actu­ally dips into 5/4 though you’d never notice), four on the floor cow­bell (more bands could stand to bring that back, it sounds great).

A-side “The Rococo Tape” (home of the afore­men­tioned cow­bell) is a per­fect rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the lazy, sum­mery sound of the record. It struts for­ward for the first half, with Paparazzi’s sassy extra syl­la­bles extend­ing all the words, and then, after a pre­cisely deployed har­mon­ica comes out of nowhere and slips right back into that nowhere, dis­in­te­grates into some reverb-soaked stu­dio chat­ter that gives way to a descend­ing gui­tar riff that brings the song right back, only a lit­tle faster. It’s a total pop jam with a sur­pris­ingly weird and con­stantly shift­ing struc­ture. The talk­ing in the mid­dle almost serves as a kind of cho­rus, break­ing up the sim­i­lar first and sec­ond halves. This bizarreness of form, which doesn’t derail the song at all, actu­ally turns out to be a bless­ing, as it lets the song main­tain a feel­ing of sur­prise, which is almost impos­si­ble in recorded music. No mat­ter how many times you lis­ten to “The Rococo Tape”, it always sounds like maybe some­thing dif­fer­ent is going to hap­pen this time.

“Epic Pro­por­tions” is a self-referentially titled slow burner that starts with the sound of a match and some sparse piano chords before bust­ing out another per­fect gui­tar riff, one that man­ages to hit that unex­pected flat six on the last chord and keep you from get­ting com­pla­cent. It pairs per­fectly with the ghostly female oohs that accom­pany it start­ing in the lat­ter half of the song. Despite its title, “Epic Pro­por­tions” is a song that refuses to get dra­matic or lose its cool. The song goes through a series of builds, but always pulls back into that acoustic gui­tar riff and loses the drums just at the moment you think it’s going to let loose. Take, for exam­ple, the moment, just before the 3 minute mark, where every­thing drops out under a crescen­do­ing key­board sound, and then, instead of the crash we’re expect­ing, we get a return to the steady 4/4 time, and an incred­i­bly sparse, chim­ing gui­tar. I’ve said before that delayed grat­i­fi­ca­tion is the key to great pop music, and this is no excep­tion. Even Paparazzi’s final leap into falsetto and the mob of over­dubbed “oh no”s at the end of the song never really sound like they’ve lost control.

All of The Paparazzi’s music strikes a per­fect bal­ance between the kind of loose, flow­ing rock music peo­ple usu­ally refer to as “sham­bling,” and really excel­lent pop crafts­man­ship, result­ing in some per­fect jams to tide you over until the warm weather kicks in. The two sides fit per­fectly together to form songs that are simul­ta­ne­ously heavy and light, full on the one hand of lyri­cal puns and light­hearted touches like the lit­tle dis­so­nant piano fig­ure that pops up after the clos­ing chords of “Epic Pro­por­tions,” and on the other of var­ied and extended har­monies, gui­tar riffs that sound clas­sic with­out sound­ing old, and rhyth­mic and met­ric shifts that keep you on your toes. More bands would do well to remem­ber that although some­times songs with three chords are nice; most of the time things get a lit­tle more inter­est­ing with four.

Gabe Birn­baum

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