By Berlinda Recacho
Do you have to live a lifestyle of tragedy and excess firsthand in order to sing about it authentically? Or does imagination and an eye and ear for observation suffice? We don't always equate great songwriting with great literature — though perhaps Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize is a step, if not a giant leap — in the right direction.
Like Molly Rankin, front woman of indie-pop purveyors Alvvays, I am a fan of the master short story writer Alice Munro. Like Alice, Molly is Canadian, and clever with her wordplay, but I didn't really connect their common talent for storytelling until I listened to Alvvays' excellent third album Blue Rev when it debuted this past October. Alice Munro is a detailed documentarian of seemingly ordinary, rural lives which are overturned by small epiphanies and quiet revelations that have thunderous effects on the people involved. In a Munro story, which reads as richly as a novel, an impulsive decision can resonate to the point of destruction — for better and worse. While the members of Alvvays are seemingly the antithesis of rock and roll excess — a longtime couple making music with childhood friends and talented technicians, with Molly Rankin taking her narrative talents to the next level — I no longer immediately think that she's mining her own life for content. And maybe she never was. But here on Blue Rev, the follow-up to two other albums, her voice seems better than ever at conveying the hapless acts of the lives of others.
"Belinda Says" references a 1988 Belinda Carlisle hit (penned by Rick Nowels and Ellen Shipley) and channels resonant minor power chords into a tale about an accidental teen pregnancy that didn't even need the help of the alcoholic drink that lends the album its name. "Circumspect when you call collect/ to see if I will keep it," the narrator muses about "moving to the country/gonna have this baby/see how it goes/see how it grows." There's a tenderness to Rankin's vulnerable delivery of harsh reality, as the expectant single mother acknowledges, "Belinda says/that heaven is a place on earth/but so is hell", and admits that she's terrified of what is to come. In "Tom Verlaine", the lead singer of Television gets also gets name dropped in an evocative way: "I know you'll be there in the rain/Glowing like the first night/ Trying to explain/ That when you walk away/it's gonna be for good/You were my Tom Verlaine /Just sitting on the hood." Again, the metaphor is imbued with personal currency, a seductive portent of disaster. Why the comparison? There’s something to be said about people who say what they mean and mean what they say, especially after they've left you in the dust. In "Easy On Your Own?" the question mark transforms what might have been an anthem of independence into a reality check on a planned life gone awry: "And how I gauge/whether this is stasis or change/fill out the requirements on the page/and burn out before you get paid." When the rose-colored glasses come off, the "violins in your mind" are revealed to be "only the wind outside." Until finally, "Does it get easier on your own?" Rankin-in character-demands plaintively.
Fortunately, she is not alone, as she's joined here on Blue Rev by her partner and fellow composer, guitarist Alec O’Hanley; best friend and keyboardist Kerri MacClellan; and two newer additions to the lineup: drummer Sheridan Riley and bassist Abbey Blackwell. Alvvays has evolved into a fine-tuned, adept unit that plays as succinctly live — check out their three KEXP sessions — as they do in their recordings. The band in its current iteration is 4/5ths female and led by a woman who knows what each song requires. Rankin insisted that "Belinda Says" — which O'Hanley originally envisioned as as an acoustic ballad — needed pedal-driven distorted guitars to drive its pathos. She was right. The songs of Blue Rev employ the rough edges and ardor of the band's eponymous debut and overlay them with the more calculated and sophisticated production of their sophomore effort Antisocialites (2017). The result is a hybrid that is both familiar and unexpected. Quiet and private in their personal lives, Rankin and her band build on flights of invective and emotion to keep listeners uncertain and unsettled about the future, but better off for the journey. Blue Rev conveys the spirit of the last lines of Differently, one of my favorite Munro stories, years after the protagonist irreparably and unrepentantly crashes up her life:
"She thinks about sitting in the store in the evenings. The light in the street, the complicated reflections in the windows, the accidental clarity."
Blue Rev is out now via Polyvinyl Records.
[Photo: Eleanor Petry]