AEM103 James William Roy

Writ­ing the per­fect pop song, unlike writ­ing, say, the Great Amer­i­can novel, isn’t that much of an accom­plish­ment. Just lis­ten to a Nick Lowe album, or the first fifty or so NOW com­pi­la­tions: spot-on songcraft hap­pens all the time. And, like any respectable thing pro­duced in excess, (e.g. episodes of Law and Order: SVU or nice Catholic chil­dren) it can get pretty bor­ing pretty fast. Most good musi­cians under­stand this. If the radio won the war against entropy, com­press­ing vocals into weaponized siren-calls and crop­ping rock epics into low-calorie 3:39 chart-climbers, then the pop under­ground has con­sis­tently fil­tered chaos back into the mega-hit equa­tion, slow­ing things down, chop­ping things up, cut­ting things out, replac­ing x with y and xy/xx with xxx and y oh y oh y. Dar­win­ism, it turns out, applies equally in the nat­ural and aes­thetic worlds: per­fect copies shrivel into evo­lu­tion­ary stumps and fuck-ups shape the future. Dig it, the Rolling Stones became super­stars for being the worst R&B band in the world, Led Zep­pelin for being the worst blues band of all time, and Hip-Hop for being basi­cally the worst music ever pro­duced. In all cases, it was spec­tac­u­lar. Rock his­tory, it’s clear, is less the ele­gant pro­gres­sion of a mas­ter design than an accu­mu­la­tion of beau­ti­ful mis­takes, holes poked in Mar­shall cones, decom­mis­sioned mil­i­tary hard­ware co-opted by the bohemian rab­ble, mis­han­dled reg­gae vibes, and hissy tapes made on a four-track and handed out for free from the back of a sta­tion wagon. James William Roy, a genius song­writer, who in his promo pic­tures looks like a cross between a cool dad and the Duane John­son of a less-literal Rock, might as well be the author­ity on pop mishaps spun into metaphor­i­cal, if not mon­e­tary, gold. This guy writes per­fect songs. Then he ruins them. Case in point: The best way to find a great artist is by fol­low­ing the trail of debris he leaves behind.

Of course, this process of cre­ate and destroy can take some time. “Some­times I’ll bang out a pro­gres­sion, but I won’t know what’s hap­pen­ing with those until I go back to them in a year or so and see what’s worth res­ur­rect­ing,” says Roy. Res­ur­rec­tion might in fact be the key term to this guy’s appeal, the bot­tled res­ur­rec­tion of 80s DIY tour­ing van odor, the res­ur­rec­tion of decades-old musi­cal memes that never lost their integrity, the res­ur­rec­tion of mam­moth hooks spun out by every­man bands rather than some stu­dio super­com­puter capa­ble of turn­ing the sound of gui­tars into dis­torted square waves and bass into a phys­i­cal sen­sa­tion rather than a series of notes. You can really feel the dew of rehearsal space sweat in these record­ings. The cho­ruses stick with you like a shirt you’ve worn to about a hun­dred shows too many. Do-It-Yourself might be a use­ful mantra, but Roy embod­ies an even more impor­tant epi­thet: DIR, Do-It-Right. If some­one had played me this record in a car, I would have guessed peak-form Bob Mould. Call it Mis­guided by Voices.

If you, like me, read This Band Could Be Your Life about a mil­lion times, you can imag­ine the kind of nos­tal­gic kudos this kind of stuff deserves. The US indie rock of the Rea­gan years boasts one of the strongest discogra­phies in exis­tence, a stack of vinyl so con­sis­tently bril­liant I’d endorse bury­ing it in a moun­tain for even­tual exca­va­tion by aliens once the human race has been reduced to dust. Fuck the pyra­mids. 100,000 years from now, Zen Arcade will show up in dig­i­tal telepa­thy chronologs as the fifth won­der of the world, along­side Dou­ble Nick­els On the Dime, You’re Liv­ing All Over Me , Goo and ok, maybe Pet Sounds. But the really great thing about the son­ics of two tracks here is that there really isn’t a con­tem­po­rary ana­log to it, no blog-band par­al­lel, no micro-movement gen­er­at­ing knee-jerk buzz. It’s not so much that Roy’s old-school as much as his songs school the broad­band generation’s light-speed taste fluc­tu­a­tions, mp3 hoard­ing, the des­per­ate fetishiza­tion of the even-newer-than-brand-new. It’s time­less stuff, recorded for noth­ing, sig­ni­fy­ing every­thing. In a time when the term indie is vir­tu­ally (as in vir­tu­ally) mean­ing­less, this band has maneu­vered to the out­side by avoid­ing the outre, stab­bing at the cen­ter through tune­ful grit instead of wonk­ish gimmickry.

One lis­ten to “Paper Valen­tine” is about all it takes to make it your favorite song of the month, an a-side in the most quin­tes­sen­tial sense. Not to harp on this allu­sion, but the hook hits you in the same place as a vin­tage Sugar track, a pop gloss tossed over punk-honed work­man­ship, the taste­ful­ness of the vocal track that never sounds stretched but nev­er­the­less man­ages to nail every nuance. Do I have any gripes? Only that if Roy begins mov­ing away from mp3s in favor of vinyl, as he claims he wants to do, I’ll have a much harder time putting this song on infi­nite repeat.

B-side “Rush Deliv­ery” mar­ries some wob­bly gui­tar tex­ture to the kind of bliss­fully sham­bolic instru­men­tal melt­downs you might find in Crooked Rain-era pave­ment, the chord changes lurch­ing like an ine­bri­ated col­lege stu­dent towards what­ever mys­tic rev­e­la­tion hap­pens to hang out on the other side of the quad. It’s a tremen­dous mess, exe­cuted with the elec­tric energy of live band on the verge of short­ing out the back of some shit­hole bar. There’s a hum­ble majesty to this sort of thing, a refresh­ing exe­cu­tion of every pre­ten­tious instinct you could iso­late  in 99% of acts indebted to the same lineage.

Roy men­tioned that “Paper Valen­tine” can be imported into Rock Band, which sounds per­fect if you hap­pen to throw a lot of par­ties with an exclu­sively rock-nerd guest list. I’ve never played the game, but I under­stand that it works by tap­ping out on-screen pat­terns of notes on a small plas­tic gui­tar. The more accu­rate your shred­dage, the big­ger your score. But, Roy’s con­tri­bu­tion has a unique catch. The more notes you miss, the drunker you get, the more off-kilter your vocals and the slop­pier your drum­mer, the higher you climb on the leader-board. Get­ting it right in real life and sim­ply get­ting it right were never the same thing after all.

Ben Las­man

[[[Down­load the 7-inch]]]

~DOWNLOAD LINKS HAVE EXPIRED~
CLICK ON THE ALBUMS BELOW TO PURCHASE

Down­load Paper Valentines

Down­load Birth­day Girl