(Part 6 of a project to go alphabetically through my CD collection and, for each letter, write about an artist/band represented by a single CD…in the process dusting off some old gems, interrogating the nature of fandom, musing about rock and roll careers, etc. etc.)
I predicted some “what was I thinking” weeks when I embarked on this journey, although I didn’t expect one to arrive so early. Meaning, I have struggled with “F”!
Not from lack of candidates, but lack of enthusiasm:
- Stephen Fretwell: guitar noodling, Nick Drake without melodies (Nick Drake doesn’t have melodies).
- Frontier Ruckus: maybe it’s as great as the reviews that prompted me to buy it argue, but I wouldn’t know because I’ve never made it through the whole smothering, self-indulgent thing, either when I bought it or when I tried to listen recently.
- Tom Freund: mopey, mopey, mopey. I think I bought this one because there’s a song named “Holden Caulfield,” which I thought was cool. The song itself, less so.
Oh well. When you excavate the past you don’t necessarily find lost treasures. There was a reason I didn’t buy more CDs by these artists.
So let’s go to the power pop well for the second time in a row for this obscure but worth-seeking-out slab of Big Star/Badfinger-infused heartbreak, available on Spotify with 83 listeners and no band bio. No really, it’s good! Wait till you get to the part where the harmony voice comes in and over and aching bridge melody they sing:
Oh-oh-oh-no
I want you to know…
And tell me it doesn’t rip out your heart (it does mine).
What do they want Martha (the person referred to in the song’s title) to know? Um, next question. Something sad. Something (as he says later in the lyric) he’s ashamed of. Leaving her? Her leaving him? Definitely some kind of separation in there…
Later he sings:
If you don’t remember this, I can’t help you, Martha
Maybe it’s written on your wrist
What does he want Martha to remember? Um, going to have to get back to you on that. Also unaware of “it’s written on your wrist” as an insult a spurned lover might reach for. Maybe it’s an inside joke between the songwriter and his muse too personal to signify.
The rest of the album suffers a similar vagueness. Many of the songs sound great, but I couldn’t tell you what any of them are about. They seem to take place entirely in the singer’s mind. When he mentions “the chill of the fog” and “sleeping on your floor” on a song toward the end it’s a kind of shock–hey, concrete details that hint at a real relationship and point of view! (That one’s called “Booksong,” also worth a listen.)
Frisbie (named after the last name of one of the guys in the band) are Chicago-based. Back in the day, they got some good reviews for the album this song comes from, “The Subversive Sounds of Love,” and opened for Big Star and Wilco (a Chicago band rite of passage). After that there seem to have been the usual record company/band personnel/weaker-than-expected sales issues, and they released just one more album in 2007 (it sounds a lot like this one). But they are still together in some configuration. There’s a 2022 instrumental single by them on Spotify, and reunion shows as recently as 2019 (including one co-bill with Dolly Varden, discussed here a couple of entries ago).
Power pop, it’s becoming clear, is no way to make a living. Which doesn’t make me love it any less.