SMITH WESTERNS
The bad news, at least for Team Schadenfreude, is that Dye It Blonde is even better than Smith Westerns. Turns out that by “90s Britpop” the band didn’t mean the lad rock of Blur and Oasis, which really would’ve been a terrible fit for them—they seem to be going for something closer to Pulp, namely a tasteful balance of garage and glam dashed with a bit of new-wave electronics. In other words, a more refined version of what they were already doing. The first album sounded like a bunch of kids stumbling on a stash of killer riffs while figuring out how to put a chorus to a verse, but the new one is incredibly assured—when Smith Westerns were pillaging Marc Bolan’s guitar tones, they apparently picked up a good deal of his crafty pop smarts too. The album was produced by Chris Coady—who’s proved he has an amazing ear with his engineering and mixing work on richly textured records by the likes of TV on the Radio and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs—and it’s guaranteed to be one of the best-sounding albums from a Chicago band this year, if not one of the best, period.
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ETERNALS
White Noise Bed
The hard thing about reviving southern-California-style 70s psychedelic pop is that it was thoroughly picked over even before Wilco inspired a bazillion other bands to pillage it. Part of the reason Santah are so successful with this style—drawing a considerable amount of local blog attention, even though Chicago seems to generate this sort of music spontaneously—is that they tap into the sound’s darker undercurrents, injecting a bit of heartbreak that tangles interestingly with the mellow vibe. Mannered, intricate pop constructions like “No Other Women” are impressive, but the band is most memorable when it goes widescreen on “Overgrown” and blows up that darkness to an epic Springsteen scale.
