Anyone who's been to a university large enough to support a music scene probably knew a band, or a couple of bands, hacking away at their mitier, skipping classes by day and boozing it up by night. They were bad, you'll remember, and they gave you a seven-inch recorded with misspent student loans. There were always a couple of people who came to their shows, and they put you on an e-mail list and threw parties that still beat the hell out of a night spent ducking frat boys at the local watering hole.
The band I knew had been at it since early high school, gone from being the best damn R.E.M cover band on the Jersey shore to art school students gulping down Robitussin while listening to Blur, Ride and My Bloody Valentine albums. They bought lots of cool vintage stuff and played a few shows, but in aggregate their musical career consisted of drinking Old Milwaukee on practice nights. They lost drummers twice a semester. Their songs, like their career, were repetitive, probing but ineffectual attempts to write catchy pop songs. They lacked the prerequisite for pop, an ability to sing. So finally, after six years they packed it in, having recorded only one single, the B-side of which had a pretty cool, indie-legit instrumental with a Hammond organ, a catchy guitar hook and a Moog. It was the crowning jewel in a disappointing career.
We used to talk a lot about My Bloody Valentine and Ride and how much we hated all the nose-ring and safety-pin hardcore kids. Unfortunately, MBV vanished, and shoegaze, dream pop, noise pop or what-have-you slunk out of sight along with "Loveless" mastermind Kevin Shields. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if my friends had kept going, where they might have gotten with a little more practice, delusion and undeserved self-confidence. Racial and sexual considerations aside, hard work gets you something. Maybe Camry for BMW and Gap for Armani, but something. More than one band with delay pedals thought they could break shoegaze in America, if only they just practiced a little bit harder.
Latter-day fuzz-poppers Sixteen Deluxe are, unfortunately, permanent Camry drivers and wearers of pocket-Ts, if not something a little worse: Sad proof that hard work doesnt equal genius, and that some dreams are best left for analysis. Whats worse, the four-piece is about eight years too late to make low vocals and shimmery guitars cool again.
Having caused a buzz with their first album, "Backfeedmagnetbabe" (1995), a hip if overarchingly mediocre collection of grass-roots, guitar-heavy fuzz pop, Sixteen Deluxe were subsequently picked up by Warner Bros., got a bit of acclaim for their major label debut "Emits Showers of Sparks," and then were dropped, like a dozen other bands who couldn't make it out of the in-vitro suspension chamber that is the second half of MTV's "120 Minutes." Their guitars and effects pedals still cranked to 10, they've re-emerged from the shadows of humiliation in their native Austin, Texas, with a new six-song EP, a slightly darker sound and boy-girl vocals miked so low that only Schnauzers will be able to decipher the lyrics. You can tell from the way the recordings are produced -- the tightness, the deliberation, the rigorous song structure -- that Sixteen Deluxe is a hard-working band, one that just won't give up, ever.
The 15 seconds of the first and title track on their new EP, "The Moonman Is Blue," gave hope. A three-note bass line and a low-key organ churning in the background seemed to promise something different than the glitzed-out, effects-laden shoegazing-cum-alterna-pop Sixteen Deluxe made in the past. No such luck. Enter sound effect -- a needle scratch reversed -- and wonk-bang-boom, it's showtime in Texas, a bunch of loud guitars on infinite reverb up front, burbling electronic noises somewhere in the backseat and one driving riff, repeating forever, even through key changes, glistening with unabashed digital processing.
On "Over and Over," the second track, the shiny lead guitar yields to a female vocal and a pop-o-matic chord-a-bar chorus with a melody straight from "Teletubbies." Its pleasing enough, if in a sing-along-kids kind of way. The real stunner is the lyrics, the first couplet of which is trenchant to the point of irony given the bands label situation: "I'll start it over and over again this time, what have I got to lose?/When I think I'm coming down again, I'm wearing somebody else's shoes." It's nice to hear that they're not losing heart, but geez, if theyre gonna go leaving strings with a sign saying "Pull me to dismantle" attached to every other verse, tugs will be felt.
Supposedly, Sixteen Deluxe have their own studio and plan to release a new full-length album soon. The group works hard, obviously, but they just don't have it. But unlike my friends' band, they arent yet prepared to shut the garage door and lock themselves out. With any luck, arguments about paying back studio loans will cause the band to scatter before the full length is released. But unfortunately for already overburdened record reviewers and college radio station programmers, Camrys have a reputation for reliability and pocket-Ts are still being sold at Gaps everywhere.
