The Aluminum Group
Plano (Minty Fresh)
by Nik Rainey
“What a drag it is getting old,” I vaguely recall someone saying (was it Pliny the Elder? Lord Mountbatten?), and my inclination, after a youth not only misspent but non-negotiable in the present economic system, is to agree with whoever it was that said it (Kemel Ataturk? Jack Paar?). Gone are the days when a simple amplified cement mixer run through a rack of decaying distortion pedals with the putty-palated murmurings of a hyperthyroid case in a pair of sperm-count-lowering trousers superimposed over it were enough to satiate this green lad’s yen for sound. No, as some of us age, a real bummer of a condition as the sage implied (Archibald Cox? D.W. Griffith?), so too does the ear become sensitive to the layered shadow, the curlicue, the pointilistic dot of detail in our sound-saucers of choice, which is why the word “art” begins to get hucked around a lot more often. But let us be frank, youngsters – what we talk about when we talk about art is as often as not really its bowtied, anal-retentive cousin, craft, strutting about in art’s smeared overclothes. Which is fine by me, I daresay, for even as I cultivated a secret patch of culture hidden amongst the carefully-trashed ruins (those Steely Dan records may have been well-concealed behind the world’s largest collection of Slaughter and the Dogs bootlegs, but they could not be ignored, tick-tocking away underneath like a triple-scale session drummer’s tell-tale tom-tom) in my angry salad days, now that I’ve aged past the ability to quaff enough sweet nepenthe to flatline a yak and still make it to work by nine the next morning, I have been gradually trading in truncheons for trenchance, my purple-faced rage for a vermillion haze.
Which brings me to somewhere in the vicinity of Plano, an opus so tastefully appointed, so artfully/craftily arranged, so very adult-sounding, that I sincerely expect most of you will have cleared the room by the end of this sentence. If any of you can still hear me as you flee down the tunnel to the safety of whatever umlaut-strewn band of goat sacrificers you currently favor, I’d like to let you know that I don’t blame you. The Aluminum Group would probably be odious to you. Hell, even I had a few moments of doubt before I succumbed to their pop sophistry (and I own three Aztec Camera LPs) – these boys (two over-thirty brothers from Texas, chiefly, though the whole thing’s shot through with a very British sense of icy-hot style) play with some very dangerous elements through most of this. Take, for example, “Sugar & Promises,” which is soldered together with the kind of syncopated discoid string-synthage mulletheads like Rick Astley used to pule out by the bucketful and the chorus, I swear to God, reads “Johnny, don’t go there” (and not in any geographic sense), but is even still 2-1/2 minutes of utter pop bliss and quite possibly the highlight of the disc. Not that it doesn’t have formidable competition: “Angel on a Trampoline,” “A Boy in Love,” the gender-fuct “9 Months Later” and the gender-preference-fuct “Sad Gay Life” are sure to plectra-pluck the heartstrings of anyone who preferred goosebumps to goosesteps in the demilitarized pop zone of the eighties, not quite up to junior-Costelloids like Roddy Frame or Paddy MacAloon in the lyrical department (if anyone can tell me why the brothers Navin felt the need to toss in a line from “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves” apropos of nothing, well, bully for you) but in delectable lockstep with them musically. Again, it’d sit like castor oil with the kiddywinkies, but for those of us who can relate to the honeyed-cereal-and-morning-papers-over-e-z-pop theme of Plano‘s “Sunday Morning” more than the drug-spooked-and-half-blind subtext of the Velvets’ “Sunday Morning” these days, it’s pure salve.
(PO Box 577400 Chicago, IL 60657)
