Friday, February 10, 2012
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The Dears, Theater of the Living Arts, Philadelphia, 1/17/07

by The Bridge
02/02/2007

photo of the dears taken by suzanne delaney

photo by Suzanne Delaney

Everybody talks about the nostalgia machine, but nobody ever does anything about it. Pop music's retro-lution is out of control, as any magazine critic (or record store geek) will be happy (in their dour sort of way) to tell you. Radiohead's O.K. Computer was great the first time, sneered my friend James, when it was called The Wall. He had most likely perused the scores of rock rags who had jumped all over the album's echoing, polyphonic layers and labeled them Floydian. Virtually all of the early nineties Seattle bands were accused of ripping off either Mudhoney or each other, and of course every damn one of them was nicking Led Zep. Or something. Lenny Kravitz ripped off every major black artist from the seventies - actually, make that every major artist from the seventies, period - and badly, too. All sorts of folks have been accused of ripping on Bob Dylan (but not his son, who seems to have somehow overlooked his dad's entire catalog). The neo-new wave (I know, but what am I supposed to call them?) synth bands are ripping off the Cure and New World Order and Brian Eno and so on. Interpol is ripping off Joy Division, and a half-dozen new bands are ripping off Interpol.

So I would love to blame my remarkably underwhelmed response to the Dears, whom I just saw for the first time, on their blatant recycling of the Smiths' schtick. It certainly would make for a neat little segue from my opening paragraph. And that's why you shouldn't start writing the review before you see the show.

Not that they didn't sound like they had spun "Meat is Murder" a time or two in their formative years. On the contrary, they were quite comparable, with similarly mopey-hearted confessional lyrics, along the lines of "I promise not to cry anymore" and "It's never, ever what we wanted it to be [repeat 20 times]". Can you blame dozens of journalists for invoking Morrisey's name?

Well, no. (Otherwise you'd have to get mad at me, too, and no one wants that.) For one thing, the Dears have bass lines that sound more like the Cure than anything else, and a lot of anthemic, chest-pounding choruses that I can't imagine Morrisey singing as easily as I can, say, that one "rocker" dude on last year's American Idol. In other words, yeah, there's a noticeable influence. But there are more than one, and the Dears' sound doesn't openly ape any one of them. So why do they end up sounding so predictable?

photo by Suzanne Delaney

It's not for lack of talent or catchy songs. Murray Lightburn's voice is a generally pretty sound, even gorgeous at times, with a smooth, thick resonance and a fairly impressive range, although some of the higher notes sounded strained live. It's just on those aforementioned chest-thumpers that he does this unattractive grunt-singing thing - an emphatical glottal attack of the sort you're likely to hear from earnest Christian pop-rock singers when they lay into the "good part." But really, that was just an occasional blip - he's got a pretty solid delivery. His vocals are often flanked by two girls on keyboards who offer watery harmonies that gild his dark tenor with a nice, ghosty bit of bell-tones. Whenever the band strips a song down to these three voice, an atmospheric swell of synths, and a strum or two on the guitars, they create a cathedral-at-sunrise kind of etherealness, and it's at time like these when the lyrics seem their most poignant and quotable. But it's not the sort of thing you can do in every song, and that may be part of the problem. Each trick the Dears has to catch your ear sounds, after two or three more songs, like just that - a trick, and one of the only ones they know. Most of their tunes start dark and thrummy and build to a rousing, layered climax that sounds less rousing and layered the third time around. And is it just me, or did the drummer play the first half of the set about half a measure faster than everyone else?

Now, time for full disclosure: when I caught this show, I was a) ragingly sick, b) damned near broke, and c) dead tired from working two days of double shifts back to back. Plus I had never heard a thing by them and was in no mood to be charitable. So that may have colored my judgement a little. But I am afraid that the factor that really holds sway over me is the fact that I have, at approximately thirty years of age, seen roughly a bajillion bands, and I am no longer floored by good musicians with catchy songs.

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