:: Track Listing

1. Kids are the Same [mp3]
2. Easy Way to Be Cruel
3. Our Weather
4. It’s Been Done
5. We’ve Got History
6. Our Turf
7. You Want Trouble
8. Don’t Take It
9. New #4
10. Your Feelings Don’t Show [mp3]
11. Southend-On-Sea



:: Record Review (No Big Hair)⊙ No Big Hair Home

Pants Yell!

Recent Drama (NBH)
(Asaurus Records/The Paper Cities; 2006)

Rating: 75%


It’s not so rare for an album to focus on childhood. Many bands, from Architecture to Helsinki to The Boy Least Likely To, are often described/derided in terms of their naiveté and playful musical sensibilities – emblems of unblemished youth that most indie-pop bands wear proudly. What’s hard to find are bands examining childhood with the same rigor and intensity generally devoted to life after junior high. On Recent Drama, the second album by Pants Yell!, youth is too meaningful to waste; like a messenger bag packed by an overprotective mother, the songs are filled to bursting with references to school nights, homework and writing journals in bed.

“I guess we’re too young,” Andrew Churchman sings on the semi-rebellious “Don’t Take It,” a lament familiar to anyone who has ever argued with their parents. But Recent Drama is no concept exercise. The album-opening “Kids Are the Same” begins with the line “You always say you hate the city / fur coat over the chair”; it’s an image – the pretensions of the spoiled rich – that works at any age. For once, here is a band that uses early teenage life as a mirror for the world of one’s twenties, rather than the other way around. All the standard adolescent hang-ups are presented - loneliness, cruelty, pent-up emotions – but from the simple perspective of indie-pop innocence, any potential triteness drowns in the wash of perplexed earnestness.

Pants Yell! is certainly an indie-pop band (it would be a misnomer, even a disservice to call the group’s sterling guitar lines and unassuming rhythms rock), but in the way Pavement was at its most melodic. The bouncy three-piece group dubs in the occasional second guitar or keyboard, but the musical interplay is polite, never collapsing into fiery disaster the way Malkmus’ songs always threatened to do. Churchman’s vocals are no less amiable and barely rise above a speaking voice. Uncoincidentally, Pants Yell! shares melodic similarities with labelmate Winter Vacation, but the album’s production values are much cleaner. It’s a fitting sound for a band with songs just as concise as they are spartan: Recent Drama runs through 11 songs in a mere 26 minutes. No mess, no frills, no fuss; in fact, the album’s mood is only shaken by the instrumental “Our Turf,” which, briefly, introduces an element of menace in the form of reverb and a wavering electric guitar. By the next song, though, the moment has already been forgotten; such is the fearlessness of youth.

The members of Pants Yell! are obviously not kids. Several of the songs are explicitly about the experiences of more mature narrators, but the juxtaposition only calls further attention to observations from the younger perspective. While the enjoyment of breezy guitar pop is often as fleeting as childhood memories, Recent Drama has wisdom beyond its years. David Greenwald :: 29 May 2006 |