from Motif Mag - 02/17/09 G.W. Mercure -
Propellers fly;
Give The Propellers’ complicated simple songs a spin.
You begin listening to “The Propellers 2” and before it’s two minutes old, you’ve heard the most perfect piece of popular music you are likely to hear in a long time. It’s a relentless melody built into a round which a xylophone echoes note for note over an ascending bass line while an electric guitar plays a harmony of second position fifths.
It’s familiar to you: It’s about bills, and pills, and sleep, and gas money. It’s called “Worry (Part 1)” and you can’t get it out of your head. Not even after an ambitious murder ballad, “Roundabout Train,” reestablishes The Propellers’ sound, in case you’ve forgotten their masterful 2007 debut. A synthesizer playing pungent chords with flattened thirds brings the bent notes of the blues into the post modern electricity of progressive rock.
The band climbs chord by chord into an infectious organ jam that would make Garth Hudson proud and when you think that train is going somewhere new, they turn the whole thing around.
By now you’re listening to the most complicated simple songs you are likely ever to hear. From “Silly:”
“This silly song is just a flash in time/Some rhythm and some rhyme/It won’t last long/ This love is music without end and when I need a friend, you are around.”
“She’s Not Alright” takes the leash off of their well-constructed arrangements long enough to find the joy in looking the other way. Van Morrison did the same thing on “TB Sheets” but it was pure theatre: The shame was contrived, the regret palpable only in Morrison’s improvisations: Here, it’s not even alluded to. It doesn’t need to be; it’s the core of the song:“So much easier for everyone to tell her just what she should do/She can’t explain the kind of pain that she’s going through.”
This line is delivered as a practically whispered refrain, barely audible. Then the band cranks up while a celebratory scat spars with the title refrain. You’re hearing the equivalent of Nero fiddling while Rome burned.
A lullaby for piano and upright bass, you can practically touch the wonder of childhood in the deft right hand arpeggios of “Buttercup.” But that’s not what this song is about, as you’ll be able to tell by the urgency of the brushed snare and the subtle menace of the organ, panned hard right.
Tom Chace is a revelation on this record. The decay in his voice yields to open spaces where the sound of one instrument is lost in another, lost in another, and lost in another, all of them tethered together by the ache and lines in his vocals. He’s reminiscent of Ray Charles and Richard Manuel. Much of his best work is filtered to sound distant and one could almost miss it behind the organ and piano. Some of it isn’t really even singing at all, just a plaintive petition, a dark prayer, as on “Fantasy:”
“What am I going to do with all of my stuff/What am I gonna tell the kids… The food’s not gonna be as good/What am I gonna tell the kids?”
It’s unforgettable, it’s painful, it’s real, and it flows right into “Worry (Part 2)” which reprises the opening track. Here the bills, the pills, the sleep, and the gas money pile on one another more quickly, and the bass line menaces, pounds. An electric organ rescues the track from nihilism, however, and turns the whole thing into a benediction, evoking the joy of having nothing left to lose. By the time the track ends you realize that the music was so irresistible, so curious, so well crafted that you didn’t realize you were listening to something happen, something break. You didn’t realize you’d been listening to an album.“What me worry? I’ve got time to pay the bills, I’m sleepy. Where’d I put those f-ing pills? Oh, honey. I can’t see you, I’ve got no gas money.” Buy the record at www.75orless.com
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