The Elevator Drops
People Mover (Time Bomb)
by Nik Rainey
Based on the evidence I’ve culled from several nonplussed spins through The Elevator Drops‘ latest, People Mover, overturning acres of arid critical ground in search of some deep-rooted, elusive adjective that none of the archaeologists that preceded me had dug up before, I finally found one, cracked and dulled by years of callous neglect but with a fresh glint from the angle at which I held it up to the light. How’s this: The Elevator Drops are dreamy. No, not in the way that bands whose members probably used the Cocteau Twins’ Treasure as a teething ring are thought of as dreamy. Who among you only has dreams that drift and billow gossamer-wise under your subconscious’ own special Vaseline-lensed glow? The Elevator Drops play like rock’n’roll’s fever dream of itself: a free-floating compound of allusions, half-remembered motifs and full-fledged quotations, every bit of it familiar but arranged in a foreign, not-quite-logical manner that keeps you slightly to the left of comfortable, a feeling I’d compare to the first twinges you feel just before that tab of acid kicks in if I, er, knew about such things.
They’re reputed ’round these parts to be a joke band of sorts, but the ever-important context of their joke is as permeable as water and just as hard to grasp. Yeah, I guess these are lofty words to attach to a band that’s staked its claim with a run of inscrutable pranks – the more empirical definition would probably be that these guys are amused enough by their inside jokes that the need to let anyone else in on them is, to them, unnecessary. But the fact remains that once you get past the obvious references littered through the first two songs (“Sentimental Love” – “Heart of Glass”; “Coke and Amphetamines” – Led Zeppelin drum intro, rising early-Beatles harmonies, Police-inspired skanque blanc breaks), which, if you can’t quite divine their point, at least give you something to hold onto, the remaining songs, many of which bear amusing but bewildering titles (“March of the Kraftwerk Replicants,” “Unabomber vs. Hollywood,” “Theme to the Gary Newman Show”), take all their borrowed clichés and retro-musicological motifs, throw them into the air like a raucous game of 52-influence pickup, and capture what comes down in sonic terms. You come out of People Mover like you do from a dream: disoriented, a little frightened, and unable to explain it to anyone else. In fact, while this album is chockablock with skewed pop hooks, after three separate listens, I can’t recall a single one. Maybe I’ll transfer that bedside dream journal of mine to the stereo.
