The Posies

Success (PopLlama)
by Nik Rainey

Outcasts in their own land for not cutting their bright Beatleisms with swathes of Black (Sabbath/Flag), keepers of the flickering flame of warm pop power, nonentities in a teeming crowd of techheads and swagger-swillers…The Posies were a band out of time. Yes, fans (I’ll meet the five of you back at my place for a liquid wake after the review), we must now speak of them in the past tense; after struggling through the better part of a decade, releasing a passel of pooh-poohed platters under the inauspicious auspices of a major label, and failing to find a significant audience for their crystalline songcraft and seamless harmonies beyond a tiny coterie of enraptured fans and critics (even after stooping to embittered, profanity-laced lyrics and semi-aggressive rock action on their previous record, Amazing Disgrace, in a vain attempt to drum up controversy, get yanked from the racks at department stores, or get a rise out of somebody,anybody), Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow have crawled back to their childhood home (their original label) to gasp out a final course of high-quality pop songs, and then expire. They’ve even gone so far as to title this the opposite of their first LP, Failure. (I’m tempted to use the term “a full-circle of Posies,” but I promise I’ll abstain from putting that in the review.) And it certainly sounds like a final album – the lyrics are wet with finality, confusion and recrimination (“Fall Apart With Me,” “Who to Blame,” “Farewell Typewriter”), which gives these songs a thick air of melancholy while somehow steering clear of Sister Lovers territory. (It’s hard to sound despairing while you’re harmonizing.) And damned if this isn’t the album that the Posies have been slouching towards all career long – toughened by experience without tainting the song stylings, forceful and delicate, intoxicating and sobering, wending its way through a course of disillusionment, resignation, and begrudging renewal (the subjects of every pop song once the songwriter hits thirty), finally stopping short and prolonging its own agonizing self-euthanasia on the epic (by pop standards) closer, “Fall Song.” “It’s too nice to breathe,” they repeat over and over over an aggressively powerless circular riff, and as the song slowly fades, you realize that, in spite of all previous evidence, the Posies have been swigging from their own hidden stash of vintage Seattle angst all along. They just sweetened it a little differently, that’s all.