5 posts tagged “sunshine pop”
I've fallen behind on my sunshine pop theme due to spending last night sorting out the dueling MySpace players problem. Solution: no more MySpace players. If they've got it set to autostart, there's not a thing you can do about it by tweaking parameters in the embed code.
In reviewing the tags on today's mp3 files, I realized that I've been conflating sunshine pop with "baroque pop." The archetype of the baroque pop song is Simon and Garfunkel's "Scarborough Fair/Canticle," but another song on the same album (Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme), "The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)," is certifiable sunshine pop, so the two subgenres are largely intertwined in style, but not mood.
Eric Matthews has been plying his baroque, and occasionally sunny, pop since 1995, when he released his first album, It's Heavy In Here, on Sub Pop, of all labels. In the present decade he has released two albums on Empyrean Records, the most recent being 2006's Foundation Sounds. The sunniest of its 17 songs is "All the Clowns"--
Neil Hannon has flitted from style to style in his enduring career as The Divine Comedy, and he is no stranger to sunshine pop. While true sunshine pop tends toward naively earnest lyrics, I don't think earnesty* has ever been a component of Hannon's songwriting. (Not his best songwriting, at least; while impeccably arranged, Absent Friends sinks under the weight of its bloated Meaningfulness.) Wryness, slyness, archness, satire, ridicule, exaggeration, swagger, irresponsibility--these are the ingredients of his finest concoctions. "Perfect Love Song" may be all sunshine on the surface, but I can hear Neil smirking all the way through:
And now there is Steve Rinaldi, performing as Rinaldi Sings (thanks to Salty Miss Jill for hipping me to him!):
And that concludes my abbreviated roundup of sunshine, or vaguely sunshiney, popsters. No, wait, it doesn't--here's a repeat of Mike Flowers's blindingly brilliant (like the sun!) "A Groovy Place" (delivered with an even bigger smirk than Neil Hannon's, I imagine):
OK, now I'm done.
* The spellchecker tells me "earnesty" isn't really a word, but I think it should be, so it stays in.
Brent Cash has swooped right up to the head of the Sunshine Pop class, pushing aside all those who have been keeping the flame alive (just) for the last decade. And most of those keepers are not really sunshiny at all, they tend toward the cloudy and morose but occasionally let some crepuscular rays of sunlight filter through. Their songcraft is rooted in Burt Bacharach and Jimmy Webb, with unexpected chord and meter changes around every corner, and arrangements that could stand on their own as instrumental lounge music. Matt Hales, a.k.a. Aqualung, is such a one, though his chord progressions reveal more of McCartney's influence than anyone else, as on the exquisite "Brighter Than Sunshine" which is the first song in his MySpace player at posting time: Argh, I can't turn off the autoplay, so here's a Seeqpod player instead:
Everything else I have in the queue just got pushed back, because I have minutes ago discovered the brand-new, phenomenal debut album by Brent Cash, How Will I know When I'm Awake. This may mark the first music out of Athens, Georgia, that I've liked since the B-52's. It's sunshine pop at its finest: Bacharachian chord changes, Carole King-ish piano rhythms, lush arrangements, and, well, sunshine galore. The press release sums it all up, you can read it on his MySpace page, or you can listen here before clicking over:
Last weekend's holiday road trip gave me time to listen to every CD in the minivan, including some I hadn't heard in months. One of those was Sunchild by Thief, from the Berlin-based Sonar Kollektiv. (A musical collective, it seems, is a bunch of people who make music together in groups of two or more under different monikers for commercial release. Or it's a fancy way to say "record label.") Thief is a collaboration between Stefan Leisering and Axel Reinemer of Jazzanova and singer Sascha Gottschalk, and I won't pretend to know any more about them. I last listened to Sunchild in early summer, when I got it, and it never progressed from "nice while I'm listening to it" to "I'm still humming the songs days after hearing them." But this time some of the songs made that jump, the foremost being track 2, "Atlantic":
I think I've isolated Thief's musical DNA: they're a cross between Stereolab and The Association. Here are one song from each to back up my claim:
Does that sound about right? Mrs. Veneer hears more Duncan Sheik than The Association in Thief, and wants me to append one of his songs, but I'm saving Duncan for other purposes. Speaking of Mrs. Veneer, the Sunchild cover art strongly resembles her own, especially the lettering of "thief." Which is to say it's lovely.
I don't know if Mike Flowers ever heard Orpheus, but they have the original sound that Flowers emulates with his Pops (a sound which I now know is categorized as "sunshine pop"). Their biggest hit, "Can't Find the Time," still pops up on oldies shows and movie soundtracks (Hootie and the Blowfish covered it for Me, Myself, and Irene). Orpheus' delicate melodies were supplemented with grand arrangements by Alan Lorber. I've selected "Lesley's World" from the first Orpheus album (1968):
As another aside, I mentioned earlier that it was common practice in the '50's and '60's (at least) to put several groups on the road, touring separately under a common name, to exploit the popularity of a group or record. Obviously you couldn't do that with superstars that everyone knew, but with minor groups where the members were more anonymous, it was done all the time (almost always without the knowledge or consent of the original group). Remember that this was before music videos became ubiquitous. You could never get away with it today. Also, remember, that the practice was at least "quasi-legal," since the original groups would have been required to sign away the rights to their names. One of the Boston groups was called Chamaeleon Church; this was a Lorber group, and included as its most famous alumnus a keyboardist named Chevy Chase (I'm sure you've heard of him!). In a published interview a few years ago, he mentioned that this group had done a tour of "small Southern colleges" as - you guessed it - Orpheus. He said that people would shout "You guys aren't Orpheus!" but, then, they'd play "Can't Find the Time" and "Congress Alley," and the hecklers would shut up.
Orpheus member Eric Gulliksen provides a history of the band on the Orpheus Reborn website. The page includes this strange preamble:
Note: One of the founding members of Orpheus has requested that his name, likeness, and any audio clips of performances including his voice or his instrumental work, or of songs that he has written, be removed from this page. As a courtesy to this individual, we have replaced his name with (name deleted), despite the fact that it was a part of the original text. Similarly and also as a courtesy, we have obscured his likeness to make it unrecognizable except in group pictures, the copyrights for which reside with Iris Properties, Inc. These photographs are used with permission.
We have not removed the audio clips below, because:
(1) our posting of these short clips constitutes "fair use;"
(2) similar clips of these performances are widely available on dozens, if not hundreds of web sites; and
(3) rights to these songs and / or performances reside with Iris Properties, Inc., not with the aforesaid
individual, and we have posted these clips with the permission of the copyright holder.
That founding member is songwriter and lead guitarist Bruce Arnold, who now lives in California and makes collectible scale replicas of Cadillacs, of course. The original line-up of Orpheus--Bruce Arnold, Eric Gulliksen, Jack McKennes, and Harry Sandler--broke up in December 1969, nine months after the release of their third album, Joyful. Bruce Arnold put together a new band and released one more album as Orpheus on the Bell label in 1971. The other three members still play together around Boston, with three more musicians, as Orpheus Reborn.
Finally, here is a vintage clip of Orpheus "performing" their big hit, "Can't Find the Time:"
