AEM113 We Can’t Enjoy Ourselves

We Can’t Enjoy Our­selves is one the most enig­matic bands I’ve encoun­tered recently.  They may hail from Brook­lyn like damn-near every­body else these days, and their songs, though incred­i­bly well crafted, are hardly genre-bending. But when I came across their press kit in the Ampeater sub­mis­sions box, I was imme­di­ately struck by their response to the ques­tion, “describe your music.…”  While most bands take this prompt as an oppor­tu­nity to explain just why exactly they’re so fuck­ing awe­some, We Can’t Enjoy Our­selves launches into a scathing and borderline-nonsensical self-critique.  “One should be care­ful not to expect much from (our music)”explains vocalist/guitarist Gio­vanni Sal­dar­riaga.  It’s “delight­fully unim­por­tant, in poor taste, demon­stra­bly demonic, satan­i­cally point­less and thus,” he con­cludes, “absolutely fatal to art his­tory majors, com­post or com­pote enthu­si­asts, and class-conscious bores.” I sup­pose one should expect a rea­son­able degree of self-deprecation from a band named We Can’t Enjoy Our­selves, but I couldn’t shake the feel­ing that there was some­thing more to what Sal­dar­riaga was say­ing than the mere sum of the words com­ing out of his mouth.  Was it mod­esty?  Irony?  A des­per­ate plea for atten­tion?  Cross­ing off the­ory after the­ory, I finally arrived at one that seemed a bit closer to the truth—poetry.  Per­haps  Sal­dar­riaga will cringe at this con­clu­sion.  “You’ve got it all wrong,” he’ll retort, “it’s satan­i­cally point­less!”  But there’s a world of dif­fer­ence between “satan­i­cally point­less” and “point­less” and my ver­dict holds.  Some might call this dis­tinc­tion merely rhetor­i­cal but the impli­ca­tions are actu­ally quite vast.  I wouldn’t waste my time with point­less music but satan­i­cally point­less music is another mat­ter altogether.

I agree whole­heart­edly with Sal­dar­riaga that We Can’t Enjoy Our­selves is satan­i­cally point­less.  And what’s so cap­ti­vat­ing about the satan­i­cally point­less?   How is it poetic?  I’m not draw­ing com­par­i­son to the poetry of Neruda or Rilke or Pushkin or any­body so seri­ous.  We Can’t Enjoy Our­selves approach their craft more like Velimir Khleb­nikov, Lewis Car­rol, or even Dr. Seuss.  They’re of a breed of artist that, while lam­bast­ing the medium in which they work, never cease for a moment to delight the senses.  “(Our music is) inspired by Buddy Holly’s music, the Bran­den­burg Con­cer­tos and cat food com­mer­cials from the nine­teen nineties,” Sal­dar­riaga con­tin­ues. “Some­times it’ll send you into orbit, some­times Miami Beach circa 1948, a very tame year for biki­nis and bathing trunks.”  Or, to put it a dif­fer­ent way, “if you keep ask­ing us these ridicu­lous ques­tions, we’re going to keep giv­ing you ridicu­lous answers.”

In addi­tion to Sal­dar­riga, the trio fea­tures Caley Monahon-Ward on drums and Michael Levi­ton on bass—at least that’s the stan­dard lineup, but the band of multi-instrumentalists mixes it up when­ever appro­pri­ate with the addi­tion of key­boards, har­mon­i­cas, what­ever…  Front-man Sal­dar­riaga has spent the last sev­eral years play­ing clar­inet and gui­tar in hot-jazz ensem­bles.  Monahon-Ward drums for a num­ber of New York area bands includ­ing Extra Life. Levi­ton is an estab­lished singer and song­writer who, inci­den­tally, toured with They Might Be Giants in 2006.    To para­phrase, each mem­ber of the trio is a vet­eran per­former.  Per­haps that’s why they approach We Can’t Enjoy Our­selves as a side project, a diver­sion from more seri­ous pur­suits (“we got together over the win­ter to record… only after real­iz­ing we all have moth­ers named Olga,” explains Sal­dar­riaga), even though the music is suf­fi­ciently potent to war­rant more attention.

A-side “Charm­ing Man” springs into action with a sparse but ener­getic beat in which the power of the floor tom is tem­pered by the play­ful­ness of a tam­bourine.  Enter jan­gly gui­tar and bass fol­lowed quickly by vocals.  Sal­dar­riaga’s accent and hyper-melodic vocal hooks bring to mind Belle & Sebas­t­ian and yes, if you insist, cat food com­mer­cials, but the final prod­uct is some­what more manly than the for­mer and con­sid­er­ably less obnox­ious than the lat­ter.  The song esca­lates at a per­fect pace.  Gui­tar and drums launch it into a double-time feel at the first cho­rus and the delight­fully indul­gent har­monies which kick in at the onset of the sec­ond verse up the ante once more.  Falsetto coun­ter­point through­out the third verse, a maneu­ver that strongly evokes the Beach Boys, and a mildly spas­tic gui­tar riff in the final cho­rus carry the song to a euphoric end.

Clock­ing in at over five min­utes long, B-side “Liza (They Don’t Call This Danc­ing)” lacks the radio-friendly brevity of “Charm­ing Man” but the pay­off is huge when you arrive at the dance-off outro about which Sal­dar­riaga remarks, “I thought really sold it as a plau­si­ble Motown num­ber.” I’m not sure if I’d call it Motown but an irre­sistible shuf­fle pulse and buoy­ant vocals cer­tainly make for an explo­sive finale.  Not that the begin­ning of the song is lack­ing in hooks; employ­ing many of their usual tricks (lush har­monies, copi­ous tam­bourine, and a vocal line that dives from high to low but remains suf­fi­ciently sim­ple that some­body lis­ten­ing for the first time could prob­a­bly sing along), We Can’t Enjoy Our­selves offer the lis­tener another pop mas­ter­piece, one that’s less con­ven­tional than “Charm­ing Man” but equally addictive

We Can’t Enjoy Our­selves’ debut mini-album One Belongs Here More Than You was the the serendip­i­tous fruit of a bliz­zard last Feb­ru­ary.  “For two days,” recalls Sal­dar­riaga, “we laid up in the dilap­i­dated sac­risty of St. Cecilia’s con­vent in Green­point where the pew fell apart on touch and where the jan­i­tor reported to us that he played the orig­i­nal Toxic Avenger from the epony­mous film series.” With the excep­tion of a few vocal over­dubs, all seven tracks were recorded live, an impres­sive feat for a band that’s yet to play a gig.  In between takes, Monahon-Ward filled the role of sound engi­neer and pro­ducer while Levi­ton cor­rected papers on pho­to­syn­the­sis and Sal­dar­riaga stud­ied Russ­ian.  A pro­duc­tive way to spend two days snowed in, no? It’s one of the best self-production jobs I’ve heard.  But as I keep reit­er­at­ing, these guys know exactly what they’re doing at every turn along the way.  And maybe that’s why they can’t take them­selves seri­ously.  They’ve seen every trick in the pop-music book and con­se­quently rec­og­nize them for what they are—tricks.  “The coro­nary throm­bo­sis behind Liza,” ana­lyzes Sal­dar­riaga “is a lit­tle more far out than the insou­ciant plead­ing behind Charm­ing Man.” I couldn’t have put it bet­ter.  Know­ing the for­mula to pump out hit after hit is a valu­able skill indeed and one that few bands have acquired… but I sup­pose it could take a lit­tle bit of the fun out of the song­writ­ing process.  Oh well.  If they can’t enjoy them­selves, at least oth­ers will.

Nate Green­berg

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