By Berlinda Recacho
I am drawn to summer music that doesn't directly reference the season or the sun (and definitely not "Seasons in the Sun", the Terry Jacks tearjerker which I was subjected to as secondhand listening thanks to my parents in the Seventies, though Black Box Recorder's cover at the end of the Nineties almost redeemed the song). The best summer music has a sensibility that lends itself to light that is only seeping out of the sky past 8:00 pm, creating the illusion of a longer day, not for getting more things done, but for quite the opposite: the leisure of getting into a car for the sole purpose of listening to said music while you drive. At 42 minutes, Generationals' seventh album, Heatherhead is the perfect running time for coasting down the highway, windows down, destination wherever.
Bucking the trend of bands disappearing without a trace just as they are coming up, guitarists Grant Widmer and Ted Joyner formed Generationals in 2009 when The Eames Era -- a quintet I loved for their clever, catchy indie-pop tunes -- ended. Rather than replicate the sound of their previous group, the duo have swerved past their origins into a Möbius strip of influences. They loop back to honor Sixties soul, then zip forward to incorporate Seventies funk and Eighties R&B to give this material the almost magical ability to transport the listener to another place and time. Heatherhead is built from rhythm and riffs, walls of sound holding up a shimmering house of mirrors. Depth is created through layering; vocals aren't the most important element, and reverberating beneath the melody, is a fuzzy, muted rhythm underneath a thumping bass-line and waves of resounding synthesizer. I'm beginning to realize that a sad song doesn't have to be minor in chord or key; this album, as ebullient as it sounds, often dwells on melancholy themes.
"Waking Moment" is a rousing opening track, the snare driving an irresistible Motown-inspired bassline, overlaying a story about the inability to get over a lost love, ending with a ghostly echoing "Go", an intentional vinyl skip that could mean moving on, or staying in this groove depending on your perspective. "Eutropius (Give Me Lies)" takes a similar route, using an upbeat tune and infectious and seductive lyrics to hint at a past tragedy: "Dark times they could make you sad/but we lost souls can't feel it." "Dirt Diamond" presents a crunchy country-rock riff over driving keyboard sequences: "You don't get to be both/A sinner and saint/Sometimes it's more about/What you are/Than what you ain't." In "Strangers", cool space-y synth-runs are warmed up by finger-snaps and bass. Close your eyes and you're at the roller rink in the dark chasing lights reflecting off a disco ball. "If you could only say for me the reasons why/you should play this song/All night/ with the give and take/with strangers who could take our place." "Radar Man" soars upward with catchy hooks: "Most of us try to begin again/this is just the world that we're living in... I stopped believing, third time around/You stopped delivering to my side of town." The alluring, almost hypnotic beat of "Death Chasm" underlies a humanistic social commentary, imploring us to "hate the crime but learn to love the criminal... everybody needs to be alive."
"Elena" (with singer-songwriter Sarah Jaffe guesting on vocals) tears a guitar riff from The Pixies' "Debaser" and pastes it onto the pacing of "The Beautiful Ones" by Prince and the Revolution while pleading for redemption: "I know I'm preaching to the choir/and though I act quite sure/what do I know?/Haven't been sober for a while." "Faster than a Fever" is a call to action, buzzing with adages to seize the day because time flies. "Closer to your death than to your birth/You're gonna be upset to miss your favorite part/You can't erase the way things were/And is that why they say you're faster than a fever?/They can see your insides burn." "Hard Times for Heatherhead" also flaunts an attitude between release and regret. It calls to mind Ferris Bueller racing through the backyards of his neighborhood trying to make it back home with a kind of frenetic grace: "They're cracking down on communal passwords/So I will go to my grave/with a price upon my head/for all my days." "Don't leave me to my desolate ways" go lyrics on this record. "Dizzyland" is a tentative and scrambled push and pull: "I know you work alone/but we go down together/the less I know the better/The lighter the feather/the faster the bird/It must have been a lot to learn/This is all I ask of you/Does it have to be the last of you?" The aptly titled "Mitsubishi" closes out the album with a mellow ramble, the perfect vehicle to end a drive: "You were undefeated in the Major League/If you could take it so could I/Didn't I say I'd meet you there?/And wasn't that the dream?"
Generationals put the beat up front, easy to find, the better to entice you to move your body to the rhythm to dance away the heartache, as Roxy Music prescribed, even when the temperature rises outside and the humidity simultaneously weighs you down. Heatherhead may be a languorous soundtrack to summer, but I am also looking forward to listening to it out of season. After the days grow colder and darker, these songs will feel like memories of coasting down the highway, the air gliding over the wing of your hand stretched out the window on a July afternoon.
Heatherhead by Generationals is out now via Polyvinyl.