The Goodbye Party — Beautiful Motors (Double Double Whammy)
Beautiful Motors by The Goodbye Party
Michael Cantor, who records as The Goodbye Party, wears his love for Big Star on his sleeve, especially in “December Boys,” whose name twists a Chilton classic and whose tuneful, jangling, elaborately harmonized chorus scratches a power pop itch. Cantor, from Philadelphia, has been making scratchy, reedy confessionals erupt into guitar mayhem for a while. He started in the punk-pop Ambulars, and later hooked up with Radiator Hospital’s Sam Cook-Parrott in the Afterglows. He’s now on his second solo album, a rough gem of a record, earnest and heartbroken but splintering into radiant rock ‘n roll euphoria.
Beautiful Motors’ quieter moments evoke a certain kind of sweet, wistful indie pop that used to be common but has lately fallen through the cracks. You’ll hear shades of Carissa’s Weird’s lovely vocal interplay, a bit of the Boston band Dimes’ unassuming acoustic tunefulness, a touch of the great, underrated Wiretree’s stinging, sugar-high hooks. That you don’t use these bands as comparisons, ever, is a sign of how obscure this type of music has become and how far the music industry has drifted away from indie pop.
The best moments come, though, when Cantor cuts loose, finding strength and swagger and distortion in the chorus. Like the songs, the album gains confidence as it goes. There’s a country rock uproar in later cuts like “Rust” and “Lost” that might remind you of the Moondoggies or even that first electrified Big Thief album, the one they slyly titled Masterpiece before anyone else started using the term. A bit of pedal steel twangs away in “No Reason,” pulling the music towards Americana, though never all the way.
The songs, like nearly all pop songs, are about love gone awry, love past, love remembered from a distance. In the single “Unlucky Stars,” a boinging, rubber band guitar riff, a hard racket of drums shore up a sensitive boy meditation on the wreck of attachment. “Tell me what I’ve been given/not the same as what I’ll keep,” sings Cantor, in his whistly high upper register, wringing every possible bit of power pop sweetness out of heartbreak one more time. It’s definitely not in fashion, this stuff, but also never entirely out of it.
“5 AM Moonlight was written while I worked a service industry job,” says Cantor. “My shift often started around 5 or 6 in the morning and I worked outside through a pretty brutal winter. I came to view the city as a physical manifestation of capitalism, with workers trekking in before sunrise, being consumed, and then spit back out at the end of a work day, tired and empty.”
....uh, okay. But it’s still a pretty sweet-sounding bit of jangly indie pop! Right?
Listen/purchase: 5am Moonlight by The Goodbye Party
Last night, I recorded a version of "This Will Be Our Year" by The Zombies to cassette tape. All in all, 2013 was pretty good. 2014 will be better. Happy New Year.
black black black black black black
in tones of black and black on black
the canvases are tagged abstract
expressionist on every plaque
although the artist will attack
abstract and shun the word the lack
of it will not distract the claque
in black black black black black
brown brown brown brown brown
a message floats above the ground
serene reflective, and profound
a man who wound his own life down
red red red red red red red red
dead dead dead dead dead dead
Good god, I'm relieved to have completely the song-a-day project (a few songs short + a cheat or two). I decided at 9pm on October 1st to follow Spoonboy's lead and check myself into songwriting bootcamp.
You can listen to this month's songs here for now.
I had considered myself a songwriter but I wasn't writing very many songs. I was always churning out kernels of songs but I wasn't bringing songs to a finish very often. With lyrics especially, I tend to get stuck and not know how to push past those blocks. I'd get into the mindset that I will reach an epiphany and that I should be patient and wait for that moment (which seldom arrives). Working in the projects constraints helped me wrap songs up without over-thinking them/waiting for divine intervention. Recording covers helped me focus on arrangement and production, without also having to worry about songwriting. Days when I felt writing lyrics would be particularly difficult, I allowed myself time to experiment with more free-form ideas. This is something I'd done frequently in the past but had become a less frequent practice.
But really, most importantly, I trained myself to just roll in, set up equipment and go without it being a big deal. It reminded me that writing songs is fun and doesn't need to be an arduous undertaking.
I'm still in the process of triaging out what songs to keep, re-record, and/or release. I'm playing a set of song-a-day songs next week and might have some sort of CDr from this month's jams.
