#32: Eux Autres - You're Alight
Released - June 2nd, 2009 (US 7”, digital worldwide); video RE - February 11 2011
Highest UK Chart Position - Did not chart
First Heard - Cheap CD, 2014
You’re Alight represents the first real selection from my long indiepop period, which dates from about 2013 onwards. I was feeling a bit better by this time and finally able to take to the internet to look for music, so I dug around until I found the DiY scene, where the energy that I’d been missing in mainstream guitar bands seemed to be a lot more in evidence. I listened to those bands exclusively for years and if I’m honest, my taste then was pretty narrow, the result of too long spent lying in a room on my own with no disruptive influences. But I still go back to them often enough and one of my favourite records remains Eux Autres’ final LP Broken Bows, which cost me the princely sum of £1.27 and on which I first heard You’re Alight.
If Since Yesterday (#6) was about indiepop as pop, You’re Alight is about casting it as Americana. To the untrained ear, it all sounds a bit shambling, but there’s a space in the recording that sounds like wide open country, the swirling organ and rumble of the drums giving it all a breezy panoramic sweep. The lyrics are more of a vibe than something that makes any actual sense (”you’re the only secondary salmon nation under the sun”???), a series of impressionistic snapshots of touring and the American landscape. But Heather Larimer’s trembling, powerful vocal carries the whole thing off just fine: they’d probably have thrown her out of indiepop bootcamp for being able to sing properly but sometimes it just pays to do a job well.
The moment that breaks me completely is the extended coda, where the descending guitar melody plays off of Heather and Nicholas exchanging lines and it feels incredibly poignant, a kind of aural equivalent of the sun setting over rolling fields. The lyrics don’t really mean much and there’s no reason for it to move me like it does, but sometimes the simplest elements are all you need to make truly great pop music. This is, I guess, a cypher for my feelings about indiepop in general: it’s all pretty basic, hardly anyone else cares about it and yet, when someone gets it just right, it sounds absolutely magical.
