Apparently a random, late night Bandcamp download, I have no idea what drew me to this EP by the enigmatic Stacey Adams, or how it ended up on my iTunes. But I do like it quite a lot, so, uh... good. Clearly the processes that bring me music are in good working order, even when I’m not consciously aware of them.

That said, I know in advance that this music is going to sound absolutely TERRIBLE when try to describe it. But describe it I must, so let’s gird our loins and just get on with it.First thing’s first: Stacey Adams is not, as you might expect, a woman. At a guess, I’d say Stacey Adams probably two men, or maybe just one man, multi-tracking himself. He is (or they are) almost certainly recording at home, in an environment in which not upsetting housemates or neighbours is an active concern.

With requisite equipment in place but need to rock necessarily muted, Stacey Adams make sleepy-headed, weirdly gentle-sounding songs of crumbling mumble-whine and vague dorm-room sadness, utilising a palette of brushed drums and effect-heavy/low volume practice amp fuzz guitar. There’s some bass in there too actually (“don’t mind me”, it seems to be saying), so they could be a three piece? Actually, there are three guys pictured on the banner of their Bandcamp page, and three guys credited in the credits, so duh.

So yes, this is indeed SOFT GRUNGE. In fact it basically has me thinking of the kind of thing Evan Dando might be doing right now, if he was twenty one years old and had spent the past few years digging on all those momentarily trendy ‘chillwave’ groups, thinking “hey, I could do that”. And also if he sang not in a rich, doleful croon, but instead in a kind of strained, reedy chronically ill nerd voice, like a hungover Jad Fair or something.

Additionally, all but one of the songs are named after people – the titular Ms Adams, along with ‘Steve French’ and ‘Sally Salmonella’ – which, given the all-pervasive yearning slob/nerd sensitive boy stench emanating from this thing, we can only assume pay tribute to unrequited crushes, or perhaps lost friends or rivals, or whatever.

Assuming you haven’t already stabbed yourself in the face trying to imagine what all this might add up to, let me reassure you that, contrary to all expectation, this EP is actually quite good, and I like listening to it a lot.

The thing about Evan Dando y’see is that whatever else he might have done, he wrote GREAT TUNES. So much so that he could have recorded them on a penny whistle and bongos in-between kicking homeless children and declaring his support for extreme right wing organisations, and they’d still have been great tunes. Stacey Adams’ tunes are not of the same order of greatness, and indeed they don’t really sound like Evan Dando songs even in the slightest. But they do at least have a certain easy-going, hard-to-hate charm that invites the comparison. So there’s that.

Also, the key I think to making successful homemade rock/pop is to seem both welcoming and effortless. There is nothing more off-putting on the CD-R scrapheap than encountering recordings that seem to yell “I spent 128 hours mixing this track, it nearly killed me, and you’re just sitting there IGNORING it – I want you to work like I did, damn it! Work to appreciate my wonky unnecessary time-changes and multi-layered vocal harmonies! I don’t want to see your attention waver even SLIGHTLY for the next four minutes twelve seconds, for the sweat from my brow has coated each one of them in GOLD!” Total downer, man. However serious/morose your music may be, you’ve gotta meet people with a smile, you’ve gotta make it sound natural. Stacey Adams are extremely good at this. The songs on this EP are not exactly in a happy place, but their sound still seems to say, hey man, come on in, would you like a drink? We were just playing some songs, wanna listen?

Thanks Mr Stacey Adams, sure I’d like a drink, and yeah, I’d be happy to listen. Hey, you guys are soundin’ pretty good.

So yeah: this is a nice EP – have a listen.

Labels: Stacey Adams