Music
Playing Tuesday, 23rd at Exit/In w/Sea Wolf
But then I started thinking about “Popular,” that ironic 1996 anthem about the rules of high school social maneuvering. I started thinking about why and how that song worked, and realized that some of the most magical, melancholy power pop this band has crafted over the course of their last two albums utilizes strangely similar rhetorical tricks. So it turns out that albatross is actually an interesting window into this band, and why they’re so successful with their brand of mature, wistful pop.
First off, how did they get here? After Nada Surf completed The Proximity Effect, the follow up to ’96’s High/Low, Elektra dropped the band—the record had...wait for it...no clear-cut single. The trio, made up of frontman Matthew Caws, bassist Daniel Lorca and drummer Ira Elliot, took their time releasing the surprising Let Go in 2002, which was eventually rereleased on current home Barsuk. An atmospheric, almost wintry album, Let Go helped redefine the band as they dialed up the urban malaise and applied their skillful songwriting to topics such as late-afternoon laziness and the inevitable onrush of time.
In 2005, The Weight Is a Gift solidified their reputation as proprietors of crisp, complex pop. The band just finished recording an album titled Lucky, set for release in early 2008, and Caws, whom we spoke with by phone, promises more of the same—“It has all the usual elements: the slow sad, the fast sad, the slow pretty, the fast pretty,” he says.
So, back to those devices. Step one: take an anthemic assertion—“You’re popular,” “I want to know what it’s like on the inside of love,” “Do it again” or “I’m gonna have a party.” Step two: subvert it. Whereas that process was an obvious one with “Popular”— Caws admits it’s one of their few conceptual songs—with the passing years, things have become more complex. On first listen, some Nada Surf songs seem overly simple or even sappy, but the platitudes are always undercut by perfectly placed details, revealed as subtle ironies with an edge of earnestness. Caws says he enjoys working with big, simple statements: “You know children really identify with simple faces,” he says, “because it’s more likely that it’s them.”
The perfect example of this tactic is “Always Love” off The Weight Is a Gift. The chorus is a seemingly saccharine self-help lesson: “Always love / hate will get you every time / always love / don’t wait till the finish line.” But it becomes clear—in the delivery, and in the arrangement’s subtle sorrow—that this is a song written by someone finding it painfully difficult to love.
Caws asserts that to “make a mountain of your life is just a choice,” but it’s a choice that feels inevitable. Then, the bridge: “I’ve been held back by something / you said to me quietly on the stairs.” When that revelation comes barreling in, there is an inherent desperation in the construction—it’s like getting the rug pulled out from under you. All of this unfolds over a bouncy melody and lush rock palette, starting slow and swelling to a taut frenzy. As with “Popular,” the listener is dealing with an outsider, someone on the fringes of an elusive circle, whether it’s the social elite or happy couplehood.
With all that melancholy, it’s no surprise the band was born and bred in New York City and has worked so much in the Pacific Northwest—where many people assume they’re from. Caws acknowledges the Big Apple’s inevitable influence on their music. In their more rambunctious days, the financial constraints of the city were formative.
“When we were teenagers, we were scraping together the 30 bucks to go in together on the weekends for a couple hours and play the Clash and Ramones songs we knew,” says Caws. “Something about not having the leisure of sitting around and working it out in your basement, I think it makes the music a little more frantic. Some of early songs were so fast, and I think part of that was because we were so amped up for those two hours of rehearsal that it made us kind of hyper.”
Then there’s the city itself. “New York is definitely a melancholy place,” Caws says, “and you obviously feel the seasons so much. Plus, you get stuck in an elevator in New York, and chances are the person you’re with will either be interesting or nuts—and both of them are likely to be a little tense.”
As they prepare for that 2008 release, Nada Surf are celebrating well over a decade of existence and still continuing to evolve and mature—notably into one of the tightest live bands around. “Daniel and I have been playing together since high school,” says Caws. “That’s 24 years, if you can believe it. There was a period when I didn’t have a girlfriend and I didn’t know what I wanted, and it seemed like I had a fear of commitment, but, my God, he and I are so committed.”
But even with a third album ready for release on Barsuk, Nada Surf continue to occupy a strange place in the public imagination. To many, they will never be more than that one strange song. But on the other hand, at least they are known to many—and name recognition, even if it’s not the most ideal sort, is half the battle.
“The whole thing is interesting at least,” says Caws. “I think it does enable us to always feel a little bit like someone’s secret band. And I would imagine that’s kind of appealing to a fan. It is the most bizarre recognition—because even at the beginning, we were better known for a video than anything else.”
Any band capable of a song like The Weight Is a Gift’s “Do it Again” deserves better. It’s an anthem for the disillusioned, as opposed to the disaffected. The chorus is a simple entreaty to “Do it again / Come on, let’s do it again,” but then we learn, in yet another expertly executed bridge, that “I spend all my energy staying upright.” It’s an ode to ennui, and to the things we do to distract ourselves from life’s inevitable inertia.
But then Caws offers a third and final sentiment, one that cuts between the two: “Maybe this weight was a gift / Like I had to see what I could lift.” Neither defeatist nor triumphant, it is the kind of malleable sentiment capable of being different things to different people at different moments—in other words, a perfect addition to a perfect pop song.
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