Throw Me The Statue – Moonbeams
(Secretly Canadian)

The cover of this album is slightly unnerving, consisting as it does of no identifying text and a hyper-real photograph of a woman in her pants striking an exaggerated theatrical pose whilst being pushed off a jetty by another woman with a towel over her head. The sort of choice for a debut album cover where, one suspects, if you start asking “why?”, you’ll soon find yourself trapped in a psychological/aesthetic hall of mirrors, never to return.

Once you’ve got that out of the way, the music within is more easily navigable, but, for me at least, equally off-putting in part, featuring as it does many of the symptoms currently afflicting the very lamest of indie non-rock: cheap drum machines, ukuleles, occasional wacky video game noises and even, once or twice, a really weedy sounding horn section. Many of the songs have that kinda superficially jaunty lilt to them that you’ll recognise from much lesser post-B&S indie-pop fare. Y’know, where it sounds like they’re having a BIT of fun, but not too much, as if they’re worried a stern teacher might be looking over their shoulder, tut tutting them for subjecting their essentially modest, introspective tunes to such impolite hints at abandon.

I say ‘they’, but the album has the definite feel of having started life as a one-man bedroom project with little live band playing involved, but also with a suspiciously hi-fi sheen, like a (relatively) big budget studio attempt to recreate the vibe of somebody’s homemade lo-fi masterwork. Things are bright and loud and clear, but there are still lengthy, baffling keyboard outros, percussion tracks built out of cowbell and tambourine, meandering, quadruple-tracked chorus repeats and other such things that speak of a love of tinkering and a cheery lack of concern for presenting the results to a potential audience.

So, with all that down in black & white, let it be said that I’ve been listening to ‘Moonbeams’ again and again, and enjoying it immensely. Why? Well, what can I tell you; I guess it’s just plain GOOD. The songs are great and catchy and nervy and fun, and all the oft rubbish sounds listed above are employed in an interesting and often unexpected manner and, well, y’know, as I’ve already said – it’s good! Fuck it, perhaps it’s even great! And that’s that – I’ll hand in my ‘music writer’ badge at the door.

Obviously there are lots of instruments and sounds on here that I really like too, but I didn’t mention them above cos I was trying to make a point; the fuzzy, clipped weezer-y electric guitars, some really on-point live drumming and wonky, overdriven casios. And in fact, all this stuff, good and bad, is mixed up in a really cool way throughout these songs, jammed as they are with rad riffs, ingenious melodic bits and pieces, inventive rhythms, singalong choruses with pleasantly unlikely chord progressions - a veritable smorgasbord of multitracked musical fun, if you will.

Furthermore, Throw Me The Statue’s myspace reveals that they are indeed a functioning live band, and I think it would be a BLAST – a moderate blast at least – to see them do their thing on stage. Actually, as a natural born rock n’ roller, it’s positively unnerving, the burning desire I have to see these scruffy men goofily dancing around their keyboards and glockenspiels as I listen to them moderately rocking out on 'About To Walk' and 'Yucatan Gold' of an afternoon.

(If anyone from the band happens to google this up and isn’t offended by my wrongheaded slant on their work, and if you’re planning any shows in the UK, I’m sure my band would love to be considered for a support slot (see above link) – I think we’d be perfect for it and it would be a cool & beautiful thing… actually though, I see you’re playing at the Luminaire on October 30th, so you’ve probably got that all booked already – oh well, thanks, sorry, bye. I’ll be there anyway.)

I’m not going to win my writer-badge back by stating that the shorter, punchier tracks with the loud guitars are clearly the best ones here, but it’s true, so I’ll say it anyway. 'This Is How We Kiss' is the Obvious Hit Single, should such a thing have any meaning in 2008. iTunes says I’ve played it 36 times, not including mp3 player listens. It’s fucking perfect! Two minutes and eight seconds of the kind of geek-pop gold that wearers of black-framed glasses and owners of Macbooks the world over secretly dream of whilst dutifully listening to their dreary Finnish folktronica records or whatever.

But, the fun doesn’t stop there, oh no - many of Throw Me The Statue’s other songs are almost as good. Not every single one - a few of the slower, sadder songs get a bit dreary and march on longer than they need to, in a way that’s easy to succumb to when you’re recording to a woozy looped beat with dark things on your mind – see most album tracks by the intermittently excellent Wisdom of Harry (a good reference point for Throw Me The Statue’s way of working I feel) for a pertinent comparison. But a good 75% of the album is, like I keep saying, REALLY GOOD, and that’s a fine ratio for such a peculiarly off-kilter debut outing.

And the key is, of course, the songs. Throw Me The Statue’s main guy sounds like he has something he desperately wants to convey, probably re: failed relationships, or never-happened ones, or imagined ones, only he can’t really blurt it all out in a straight-up fashion for fear of maybe upsetting the people concerned, or making himself look like a jerk, or perhaps just cos that would make for boring songs (all perfectly valid reasons of course). So instead he scrambles his muse up into awkward mouthfuls of veiled meaning and book smarts absurdity that make Stephen Malkmus look like an open-hearted balladeer by comparison, at least until he decides to step out and throw in few lines of plain, descriptive fact before triumphantly scampering back again, as if to say “HA! GOT YOU!”.

I guess this has been a popular lyrical tactic ever since shy kids started banging out pop songs, and, more so than usual, it works out brilliantly for Throw Me The Statue, with the dude’s faintly desperate delivery and ability to pull a truly killer tune out of the unlikeliest ingredients coming up weird, neurotic roses every time. I mean, I’m sure he’d be the first to acknowledge that folks like Jonathan Richman and Otis Redding are working far, far closer to the perfect, universal expression of thee feeling within, which is after all The Point, but it’s also worth recognising that we educated white kids can be pretty odd, fucked up so-and-sos on occasion, and sometimes, instead of ‘These Arms of Mine’, we want for nothing more than to take it easy to the accompaniment of some mild-mannered guy drawling out stuff like “we could legalise our heads, darling / we could advertise the piecemeal of our chests” or “favourite space is a palindrome* / where talk is a cannonball / and I never have to share”. Is that so wrong? Yeah, I know, it’s weird. Maybe we should just blame society or something and move on.

But to all my compatriots out there who’ve ever clutched a Guided By Voices song to their heart as if Bob Pollard’s cut & paste musings were the very sum of cosmic truth strapped to a second-hand Who riff (which they are)… you’d better believe Throw Me The Statue are on to a rare winner.

God, what a ludicrous review.

Here are some Mp3s:

A Mutinous Dream

This Is How We Kiss

And here are some movies of Throw Me The Statue playing their song ‘Lolita’, and – BINGO! – a cover of GBV’s ‘My Valuable Hunting Knife’, on a boat. It looks cold.






*it totally isn’t, I feel the need to point out

Labels: album reviews, Throw Me The Statue, videos