Letters to Cleo
Go! (Revolution/Giant)
by Katy Shea
Good pop is not entirely unlike a good shower. I mean, you experience so many requisite showers in your life that are neither interesting nor particularly refreshing, so that when you finally do take that one extraordinary shower – the one that makes you feel like the world is at your door step and everything is going to be all right – the universe and your place in it seem as secure and complete as the squeaky clean self that you’ve just discovered through your cleansing metamorphosis. A superior pop song will act similarly upon your senses and/or sensibilities, eliciting symptoms such as bopping down busy streets in rhythm wearing not the usual scowl (which in Walkmanese loosely translates to “Me listen to music now. You not make eye contact or I look away and grumble…”) but the suppressed grin of someone city-savvy enough not to skip in public but nevertheless held helpless against the power this music can yield.
Letters to Cleo gives us glimpses of these euphoric moments on their new release Go!. The tracks “Because of You,” “Anchor,” “Veda Very Shining,” and even the saccharine anthem “Co-Pilot,” have caused even the most ardent self-described pop haters to unconsciously sway their hipster heads from side to side between drags on their Kamel Reds and slurps of double-brewed Krank20 coffee. There are some really well-crafted tunes here, but I can’t help but remember my first exposure to Letters To Cleo and how impressed I was with Aurora Gory Alice. I ran to the store to buy the CherryDisc issue of the CD and thought to myself that this was the coolest combination of power, pop, and just rock that was perfect to represent the Boston music scene. Kay Hanley impressed me further when I saw the band play at the Paradise and she blanched and looked genuinely frightened when a few testosterone-fueled college hats moshed their way up onto the stage, but still bravely squeaked her way through the set. Her unpretentious nature was further bolstered by the girlie cuteness of her look… she was just sincere, real, and immensely likable in that posture.
The band has matured/grown (or maybe just time has passed) and the edge of Aurora Gory Alice has never really been duplicated. Hanley gets thinner and thinner, her look becoming more glamorous and model-like as the band’s sound evolves into sometimes rambling, often inspiring melody-heavy pop. The album is good, it has grown on me A LOT, but they aren’t going all the way somehow. Perhaps what is missing is just (at the risk of employing a serious cliché) the “indie attitude.” It’s the intangible quality that makes “Here and Now,” more raw and interesting than “Demon Rock” (from Wholesale Meats and Fish) or “Go!” (from the new CD).
Comparisons aside however, Letters To Cleo has won me over again, at least for the time being. Upon first listen, I was disappointed, and was ready to plug this CD into the three part downward spiraling progression of the band that was supposed to be the “Great Hope of Boston…” but not so fast! Although Go! is not quite capturing the original vitality and rawness of the band’s sound, nor is it reinventing the wheel, what it is doing is giving us some incredibly sweet, catchy pop songs. They are the kind of songs that make you smile, and I can’t help but appreciate the fact that although Letters to Cleo aren’t rockin’ quite as much as they have, they are supplying us with solid writing and well-performed songs guaranteed to make you feel at ease with the world… at least until you take another one of those showers.
