50 Bucks

Gone (Stim)
by Jessica Rylan

Let’s pretend. One day in 1989, Lucas Gonze and David Curry decided not to buy any more records. They holed themselves up with old Boston rock: the Pixies, Buffalo Tom, Galaxie 500. And then some bluegrass and blues for variety. Every night they stayed up till 3 am drinking and jamming. But they had to play quiet so they wouldn’t wake up the neighbors. Cut to 1996, and one of their friends hears a boombox tape they made the night before. “This stuff is amazing!” the friend says, “It’s so current, the kids would love it!” By now they’ve learned how to edit their jams into songs, cutting out all the extraneous noodling crap and adding hauntingly spare lyrics. They start going to parties late at night, after all the annoying kids are gone, and playing the five songs they wrote that evening. And they make up five more on the spot. Cut to 1997 and they’ve put out a CD, in case you weren’t invited to the party.

The 25 songs on $50‘s debut are beautiful one-idea songs, like early Sebadoh. Simple melodies swell in and around simple rhythms; they know just how long to hold a glorious chord, and how many times to repeat a hook without playing it out. Gonze and Curry do a fabulous job on guitar (electric, acoustic, and lap steel), bass, trap and frame drums, violin, viola, trumpet and oboe. But since there’s only two of them, none of the songs features more than two or three instruments. But while this is under-written and under-produced, it certainly isn’t half-assed. They’ve obviously put in the time playing together. The lyrics progress through various stages of a drinking session: early and silly (“I’m a three toed sloth, and I don’t like me no Gothic music”), drunk and nonsensical (“Mean as a house, cruel as a tree”), to despondent verging on maudlin, when they really should have just gone to bed (“Not what I wanted, better than I deserve”). This is a beautiful CD, lo-fi in all the right ways, and since they never come play at my parties, I’ll leave it on repeat.