:: Track Listing

1. Hardcore Days and Softcore Nights
2. Dinner Mints
3. As Close as your Girlfriend is Far Away
4. Tension (Piano Verte)
5. Who Wanna Rock?

:: Record Review

Aqueduct

Pistols At Dawn EP
(Barsuk; 2004)

Rating: 80%


“As Close as Your Girlfriend is Far Away”--I’ve been trying to figure out how to describe this Jimmy Buffet dis-track for about a month now. Buffet (best known for “Margaritaville”) is the 130 year old, open-hawaiian-shirt-wearing beach-rock cult leader of a middle-class minivanned motorcade of meddle-aged mothers (one generation beyond the “Desperate Housewife” demographic). A certain mommy I know found the Margaritaville song “fun," so a certain dad I know went out and bought a Buffet-in-concert DVD to play during BBQ’s, etc. Their to-go-unnamed son, who had been introduced to such greats as Paul Simon and Cat Stevens at a very young age during car rides to-and-from tennis lessons with this dad, lost a certain amount of respect for said mommy and dad’s musical tastes when he saw the Buffet DVD on the coffee table one night next to his borrowed copy of It Still Moves (indeed he moved Jim James and co. to an untainted surface area immediately upon noticing the shoddy company they were keeping).

“(Father’s name), you know this guy is a pot-smoking octogenarian who only tours so he can sleep with his fans’ grandchildren, right?” (There’s nothing more tragic than an unwitting Viagra posterboy with a greatest hits collection that should be named “A Stable of Dead Horses”). After glancing at the television once or twice, sensing the evil that was filling the room, and remarking that the camera focused more often on human silicon-sarcophaguses than the actual “band," the mother quickly put on Billy Joel and commented: “I like that one song, but he seems a little weird all-in-all.” Satan incarnate would come off a little weird in my house, so yeah, accurate description.

Now ‘Duct’s David Terry (Aqueduct for this release = David Terry and the instruments/computers in his bedroom) has taken it upon himself to start what is undoubtedly going to be the most heated on-wax feud since Of Montreal tore a strip off The Rapture on Satanic Panic’s “Rapture Rapes the Muses." And if you think Of Montreal is just so gangsta then check this out here: Terry, on “Hardcore Days and Softcore Nights,” gets all up in your grill like the most wiggerest suburban college fratster you ever heard: “Don’t ever ask me where I’m from / In six states that’s considered dumb. . . / Because if you start askin / I’ll pull this heat I’m packin / So don’t ever ask me where I’m from." Biatch. The tropical Grandaddy guitar-n-buzz pop banger that accompanies makes the lyrics even more sarcastic, ridiculous, and altogether delicious, and spins the content of the rest of the album on a satirical merry-go-round.

While only five tracks short (and one being largely instrumental), Pistols At Dawn plays like how an update of the Onion reads. Either that or Terry is a maligned oversensitive gat-waving honky-rap self-applauding arena-rock big-hair cuckolder letch who has mastered the '80s cheese-lounge glam ballad like no '80s cheese-lounge glam balladeer before him. But he looks like this (on the left):



So that’s only 65% likely. And I'm going high-road here because I really like this thing.

Now back to Jimmy: your card has been pulled, hoe. On “As Close as Your Girl is Far Away,” Terry drops one syllable of slimey-as-can-be French (“All along I knew that we would blossom into deux”) among other schmaltzy cheap-champagne lines in order to coo his pigeon into his trailer. The music shows an uncanny mastery of bouncy, trumpeting stadium pop but twists things just enough (with ironic self-aggrandizing canned applause and too-snappy har-har delivery) to keep it street. After wooing your girlfriend the Buff trash-talks, but Terry’s intent shines through: “Too bad for you pricks like me, well they come and go everyday / They wreck your fucking life and fuck your wife then run away / 'Til the day I die I’ll always stay that way.” Ain’t it nice to have more things to make fun of? The track is hilarious, jaded, witty, sarcastic, and unbelievable fun.

And Terry’s acetic humour never ceases: “Dinner Mints” sees love dying when conversation stales, and points fingers in a college-freshman-dumping-high-school-sweetheart way on the refrain when her only answer to his too-sensitive, “how do you feel?” is, “not that great,” and, “(Ohmygod) you’re so mean / You (so) smoke crack.” It backs out with a gorgeous hair-rock guitar solo (that’s right, gorgeous and hair-rock are no longer mutually exclusive thanks to Terry) to perfect the teen-bop theme and closes the door to the pulsing warm distortion that carried the song the whole way through.

“Tension (Piano Verte)" finds a lounge balladeer coolly searching for a drink as his disgruntled lover attempts to strangle him, and “Who Wanna Rock” snips playfully at hip hop lyrics that try too hard (“Who wanna rock with the Aqueduct / I make you jump around like an awkward duck,” followed by moans of disapproval and an, “Ooooh, crap”), and finally morphs from glitch to a glossy, albeit meaningless, melancholy indie-rock mash.

You can hear the fun that Terry had recording this EP, and the results reap the benefits in tongue-in-cheek smirks at a spectrum of genres. The musicianship shows that these institutions were trashed from the inside-out, as a mini-mastery of each shines through on every song. Apt student that he is, we’ll continue the high school theme with a David Terry midterm track-by-track report: A, A, A+, B+, B. Let’s hope this performance continues after Christmas Break, when Aqueduct returns with its January full-length.

Aaron Newell :: 24 November 2004 |