Wesley Allen Hartley

Gunther Brown: Good Nights for Daydreams

Sam

Life’s lessons

One man’s Daydreams are another’s nightmares

What is it about a sad song? The catharsis of a good lament can be so sweet, built doubly on empathy and a sense that, well, maybe things aren’t as bad as all that.

With Gunther Brown’s debut full-length, frontman Pete Dubuc and crew have created the most sorrowful local record since Ray Lamontagne’s Till the Sun Turned Black. Like that album, Good Nights for Daydreams is full to the brim with regret, promises that are likely never to come to pass, and good, old-fashioned wallowing.

From the opening “No Use Livin’,” the sunshine can be hard to find, other than some splashes of cowbell from drummer Derek Mills. What’s more sad-sack than this? “This is the night I give up my life/ When you dig my grave/ Don’t pray my soul to save/ Just cover me with earth and go.” Hallee and Kati Pottle supply high-low backing vocals to put an even finer point on it, a sharp complement to Dubuc’s quiet rasp.

The following “Time and Again” takes the pace down and layers on the tears in your beer while recalling Wes Hartley’s excellent “Acreless.” As elsewhere, the heartache comes from separation: “Lay your head on the table/ Cuz this is goodbye.” Chris Plumstead’s electric-guitar break in the bridge is more lighthearted than you’d expect, though, and doesn’t quite match Dubuc’s emotion.

Elsewhere, Plumstead flashes some Allmans/Dickie Betts influence, as on the brief solo with 30 seconds to go in “The Next Time,” an up-tempo alt-country tune. The early-song fills are where Plumstead shines, setting up what ought to be great live, where “you ain’t gonna get away” is more of a promise than a threat and there is real urgency.

Except that gal seems to keep finding a way to be somewhere else, even if on “Follow You Anywhere” Dubuc makes the same promise: “I will not let you go.” This time the urgency is communicated via increasing tension. It’s moody, with lots of high hat, and boozy like an after-hours song played to a few stragglers and the bartenders counting out the drawer. Just try to enjoy the moment: “We’ve no past, no future that will last/ There’s just now.”

It’s that resignation that fuels “Forever,” an upbeat strum that’s angry and resentful, calling to mind an ex crashing a wedding he wishes was his. Like the Old 97s or the Weakerthans, Gunther Brown can lay on the biting spite pretty thick. “People keep coming around and telling me,” Dubuc sings, in a way that makes it clear he wishes they wouldn’t, “things they think I oughta hear.” And when he talks about looking back 13 years, it’s clear he’s old enough where 13 years just isn’t that long anymore.

Then the bridge goes into half-time for a bluesy Plumstead solo. It’s a touch of prog you find again in the closing tune, the six-minute “Up To Me,” built on contrasting rhythms from Mills: quick with the sticks, plodding with his feet. Here, we get to the heart of the matter: “You don’t love me anymore.” Again, it feels more like a promise than an accusation.

The overall feeling here isn’t sad, or miserable, but accepting. Resigned. There is an embracing of the pure emotion, odes to that cliche that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. There is determination, too, and ambition. Songs like “Christ of the American Road,” “Headlights and Highways,” and “Bobby Orr” (the last reminiscent of early REM in its mix of sing-song and deadpan delivery) speak of a mission. Our protagonist is on the way back to redemption. There is hope and there are big dreams.

If you set your sights on “skating circles around Bobby Orr,” coming up short, simply finding a person to live with, doesn’t seem so hard now does it? Despite all those “broken things on the side of the road” you leave behind along the way.

Spencer: Love Is Not Enough

Sam

Why you gotta be so mean?

A four-song fuck you from Spencer

Songs about love, unrequited and not, are basically the foundation of pop music. Songs about active dislike, not so much.

Sometimes one leads to the other, though. Fleetwood Mac basically rules the breakup song category, with a whole band in utter dysfunction and an entire album to prove it. And it was a lost girl that fueled Bon Iver’s trip into the woods: “And now all your love was wasted, and then who the hell was I?”

Locally, Wes Hartley and Dead End Armory got off a good breakup line or two, like this gem from “Hope You’re Good”: “It reminds me of the time you stuck a gun to my temple and made me beg for forgiveness / Aren’t I good enough to stay?” And who can forget KGFREEZE’s boast that he’s “got a better falsetto than the motherfucker you’ve been raving about”?

Thus far in Spencer Albee’s long and well-documented local career, he’s always leaned toward the Beatles’ stock in trade (all “I love you yeah, yeah, yeah” — with the possible exception of “Where You Been” off the School Spirit Mafia record, which is awfully jealous). Truly, he’s penned any number of bouncy love songs, including “So Good,” with one of the better descriptions of compatibility: “I start to sing a song I thought no one else could hear / But you knew all the words.”

But the time has now come when Love Is Not Enough, a four-song fuck you to a girl who’s done him wrong (it’s a small town, so we won’t get into particulars). The title track pretty much says it all: “You’re fucking him / You’re fucking me / Where lies the truth? / It’s in between.” Ouch.

Damn if that song ain’t catchy, though, in a dystopic kind of way. There’s nothing like personal strife for inspiring creative expression. It’s hard not to hear a little “Sector Z” from Albee’s Rustic Overtones days in the spacey keyboard lasers, and they’re balanced nicely by xylophone pings and digitized strings and growling low end. Perhaps best of all, there is that piano pounding, whether rippling single notes or big chords, that used to be such a foundation to Albee’s music, but had been recently replaced by guitars acoustic and electric.

The piano certainly drives “So Long,” the most purely pop track here and the one that reveals just how cut to the bone Albee really is: “I caught you in a corner, and like the rat you are, you tried to chew through me / If you had been more honest, just imagine how much better life would be.” It’s goofy and playful, sure, but those reverbed and doubled vocals in the chorus reflect what’s clearly a deep well of anger.

Lucky for us he’s funneled that ire into rumbling, oompa bass lines like these.

The bass line that follows the feedback open to “One2Three” is particularly tasty in opposition to a glockenspiel kind of thing: “She said, ‘Baby I’ve been sleeping / With secrets I’ve been keeping.’” It’s sedate, child-like, narcotized. The PTSD of love lost, with an “A Day in the Life” primal yell in the background for the finish and an anguished entreaty in “please remember me.”

It’s all just so different in temperament from the big happy family of Spencer and the School Spirit Mafia or the aggressive bombast of As Fast As or even the self-assured confidence of Spencer, which we were discussing not much more than a year ago. This is the sound of a kid who’s been through the wringer. Hard not to harken back to that Mafia track, “Way of the World”: “And the boys like the girls, and the girls act like they don’t / But it’s just the way of the world.”

Shit happens. And then you write a song in a weird operative voice, like “I Don’t Know,” and finish up doing a Frankie Valli thing and life goes on. Spencer’s still going to write with a poppy bounce, the bridge just might be a little more accusatory than usual: “I can’t believe a word you say / How can you treat a man this way?”

There was talk of an LP for New Year’s. It hasn’t happened yet. Will Albee continue in this vein, giving in to his darker half in a way we haven’t seen before? Let’s hope so.