John Vanderslice
Or serious and complicated ones. The theme is even more universal than you might think: Pink Floyd’s bombastic use of English postwar imagery camouflages their heartache over the loss of their partner Syd Barrett (the ostensible subject of both The Wall and Wish You Were Here). The Who’s Tommy is about love on many levels: the love Tommy’s mother betrays when she thinks her seafaring husband is dead, the blind love of the disciples for their messiah–and yes, the love of a boy for a pinball machine.
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In fact, love songs about machines are a tradition within the tradition. Take Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska. On the surface, it’s a concept album about, uh, Nebraskans, but at heart it’s about automobiles and the people who love them. There’s a car or a highway woven into the narrative of almost every song. In Nebraska the automobile functions not as a symbol but as a living character, a real entity that hovers like a creepy relative, causing trouble, stirring up resentment, taking loved ones away or bringing them home or bringing them together. John Vanderslice’s Life and Death of an American Fourtracker is a Nebraska for a different subset of the American population–indie rockers. The medium is the message: it’s a record about the subculture of home recording, a musical document about musical documentation, love songs about the love of recording songs.
The Portastudio incubated the 90s indie-rock revolution in basement dens across America, producing a generation of home-recording stars that included Sebadoh, Pavement, and Guided by Voices. It gave a new crop of aspiring songwriters their identity. It’s at least partially due to the four-track that we have come to take for granted the giant leap the Beatles made with Revolver, when they crossed the glass control-room barrier and took the faders into their own hands.
For guidance and for help
I got parts and I got spares
This subtle balance between basement and studio is the key to Life and Death’s likability. It doesn’t sound like a Concept Album in the Styx sense; it’s a baroque construction that recognizes the sanctity of the holy bass-drums-guitar trinity. The expected guitar-solo breaks are replaced with organic strings, samples, and sounds, themes and saturnine variations fluidly arranged. The guitar solo did fulfill an arranging duty at one time, way back when, and only became a cliche when producers started taking it for granted. Vanderslice finds space between verse and chorus that we didn’t know existed and fills it with reveries that fit perfectly even though they’re not what we expected to hear. He is resourceful where other songwriters are gratuitous. After absorbing this album you realize that “psychedelic,” when applied to most of indie rock’s George Martin wannabes, just means “hookless.” Vanderslice has more hooks in his tacklebox than a weekend angler.
