The Features
Exhibit A (Universal)
Listening to the influences that converge on The Features' new Exhibit A—everything from pop, rock and disco, to surf, new wave and punk—reminds me of a guy I knew in junior high who had over 400 records. He inherited the collection from his father, and it filled almost half of his tiny bedroom. Meticulously chosen and alphabetized, the albums spanned the history of rock. Not only was I struck by the vastness of the collection—which seemed to contain every rock touchstone since the '50s—but I found it difficult to imagine how any new records would make the cut.
It's easy, though, to imagine The Features poring over such a record collection during their youths, discarding bits and pieces until they were satisfied with the remainder; they've achieved something similar with their major label debut. Exhibit A packs dense, layered pop-rock textured with rollicking organs, handclaps and singer Matt Pelham's alternately tender and howling vocals into a record that spans all of 33 minutes.
The album is genre-heavy without genre hopping. It also evinces a clear commitment to the pop song, albeit slightly mangled and off balance. Guitars riff like Chuck Berry, driven by drummer Rollum Haas' manic beats. Roger Dabbs supplies the clever bass lines, while Parrish Yaw adds the whimsical, kitschy subtext with Mellotron and other vintage keyboards. Sure, there's a lot going on, and there are plenty of subtleties that don't emerge on first listen, but the chaos is tamed by the simplicity of the subject matter and by Pelham's earnest delivery.
Three members of The Features hail from Sparta, Tenn., a town, like so many across the state, so small that fighting boredom is a survival skill. Rather than run screaming, though, The Features stuck it out and used the time to channel their frustrations into music. By the time they started playing The Boro in the mid-'90s, the basic elements of their sound were there: catchy choruses, quirky keyboards, infectious beats. There even were some synchronized moves and the occasional Hawaiian shirt.
Instantly welcomed into the Murfreesboro music scene, The Features never failed to draw the cool kids and college girls in tank tops who seemed to know all the words. Things really haven't changed much: they dropped the moves, lost the guy with the Hawaiian shirt, brought in one of the best drummers in town and signed a record deal with Universal. The college girls are still turning up in droves.
What has changed is that they finally have managed to pin down their elusive sound. Always too smart to be straight rock and never straightforward enough to be pure pop, The Features instead have chosen to make camp at the crossroads, favoring at last a deft commingling of their earlier incarnations and lyrical content. Pelham has always written lots of love songs, and he's also shown evidence of a sillier side. On this record, though, the recent addition of twin daughters to his life has greatly colored the lens through which he views both the world and a pop song. (It's long been said that guys get into rock for the girls, but it's doubtful these are the girls Pelham had in mind.)
Exhibit A is rife with insights into first-time fatherhood, relationships and affection for the simple things in life, all without pretense. One of the record's gems, "The Way It's Meant to Be," has Pelham professing his adoration for his twins, right down to the monograms on their clothes. Already out as a single in the U.K., the recording takes a simple garage-rock hook, ferocious drums and frantic organs and adds the gleeful, irony-free assertion that fatherhood is a wondrous thing: "Call a doctor, call a king, someone should witness all the joy that you bring!"
In "Me and the Skirts," Pelham discovers parallels between his daughters' first experiences and his own temperament, offset by a dizzyingly protean tempo that shifts from chaotic to trotting to raucous in a matter of seconds. The arrangement kicks off like many a good rock record, with high energy, and yet The Features also know when to take a breather, as in "Blow It Out" and "The Idea of Growing Old." The first is an infectious reflection on the catharsis to be found in solitude, a guitar and an amp. The latter, which is reminiscent in feel and tone to John Lennon's "Jealous Guy," muses sweetly about the comfort of aging with someone with whom you simply can be.
Where so many of their contemporaries just rehash their influences, The Features deliver a mix of familiar textures in a way that seems new. They've spent more than a decade taming their juxtaposition of styles with discipline and restraint, something that just might secure them a place in a future index of rock history. Plus, domesticity never sounded so cool.
