Laughing — Because It’s True (Celluloid Lunch/Meritorio)
“Will She Ever Be a Friend of Mine” jangles like a long-lost Byrds tune, or maybe an out-of-print single by the Jayhawks. The Sadies, at their least bluegrassy, could sometimes pull off a similar trick, putting a psychedelic shimmer on exuberant country rock, and they’re certainly not alone. Big Star, certain iterations of R.E.M., Robyn Hitchcock and the Minus Five all come to mind as Laughing’s first LP spins. Still, to my mind, the touchstone above all others is Matthew Sweet’s Girlfriend, the most effortless and heartbreaking of the genre, full of yearning harmonies and indelible hooks and some mighty fine guitar work from one Richard Lloyd. Like Sweet more than a generation ago, Laughing nails power pop’s ease and inevitability, and that’s impressive. It’s one of music’s most difficult forms, not least because it should never look like you’re trying.
This is the first album from Montreal-based Laughing though its members are mostly veterans of other bands. Notably Josh Salter, one of three guitar/bass/singers, plays bass in Nap Eyes. Cole Woods led Winnipeg’s Human Music. Laura Jeffery, the drummer, was in Fountain. André Charles Thériault, the lone exception, hadn’t been in a band for over a decade when he joined. What brought the four together was power pop and nailing its sweet but rowdy jangle-i-ness.
Well, mission achieved. Consider, for example, the single “Bruised,” with its yearning vocals (“When you said you didn’t care/I felt something inside me tear”), its rough slashes of guitar, its battering drum line, its seething harmonies, its spiraling licks. The song is nearly perfect in its roughed-up, cowlick-sticking-straight-up messiness. Barbs of dissonance jut out from its breezy choruses, like rusty wires in cotton candy; not too sweet, not too rough.
“Secret” is slower and more vulnerable—and it’ll give you a powerful jolt of Sweet-ish-ness, “You Don’t Love Me,” maybe or “Nothing Lasts.” The guitar rings like bells, the bass buzzes underneath, the drums shimmer and pulse. “Won’t you tell me something/no one else knows/let’s get as close as we can and put on one another’s clothes,” the singer intimates, echoing Girlfriend’s exuberant, “You can wear my clothes.”
That’s the final song, a silky comedown from bangers like “Easier Said” and “Sour Note.” It’s a nice ending to a near perfect summer album, which rocks and jangles and keens, balancing on a knife edge of hard and soft, joy and sadness, as all summer albums should.
