Loud Love Songs #2
Getting to Tommy Keene
Tracking The Replacements progression of sound across time is similar to a lot of bands. If they last long enough, they usually get better at playing their instruments and start taking themselves more seriously, and they age so life is naturally more serious. So goes their discography. Sorry Ma, Forgot To Take Out the Trash is generally a punk album with real representations of talent as songwriters even if the band is still more interested in immaturity at least as a veneer. This is the kind of conflict in sound and intent that makes Power Pop a genre that has a level of immortality that other styles of music do not. Songs that originate around a basic structure have the flexibility to experiment with volume dynamics, instrumentation, and lyrical content so long as the essentials of the song are the ingredients that make it a “sing-along” type song.
Listen to what Militarie Gun is doing within the agro-Power Pop space I'll call it. Most of the time, I think it’s fair to say that people want to sing along with music. That’s basically what Power Pop is. Sing-alongs that are just turned up a little louder. Listen to “Seizure of Assets” by Militarie Gun and I’d be a little stunned if you don’t hear it as a sing along. Serious lyrical content: lapsed car payments. Hot guitars and belted vocals. “BLOODY BASTARD LEACHES / KEEP SUCKING ON ME”. It’s a pop song. I swear.
By the time we hear Let it Be, The Replacements are pretty saturated with adulthood and emotionalism. “Answering Machine” is a dramatic coda to the album, and where I’ll have Tommy Keene pick up. Paul Westberg’s voice is swimming in reverb. His guitar melodic and modulated with flange or chorus. The lyrics are a stunning representation of honesty of self. “How do you say I miss you / to an answering machine?”
I learned about Tommy Keene from Westerberg’s solo work. He played guitar on the 14 Songs tour. So because I was listening to The Replacements and Paul Westerberg discographies, I wanted to know what Tommy Keene contributed.
Most of his available work is packaged in the You Hear Me compilation. And Tommy Keene, while being a Replacements contemporary, seemed to begin as a very earnest, un-silly artist. His discography tracks with the Power Pop that generated from Nick Lowe’s slice-of-life lyricism. Or the influence of Big Star is more immediately recognizable in Keene’s songwriting than The Replacements lyrical homage but less the musical form. Keene’s melodies are aggressively easy to listen to. He seemed to master the “writing to the road” riff—his songs seem designed for windows-down listening. “Safe in the Light”. “Places That Are Gone”. “Run Now”. “Nothing Can Change You”. “Turning on Blue”. These are all essentially LOUD pop songs. Guitars are compressed (distorted). Drums are persistent. HE’S EVEN GOT RIFFS. RIFFS. The structure is there. Verse. Chorus. Verse. Chorus. Bridge. Chorus. And the lyrics are almost embarrassingly sincere.
“Now nothing can change you
When you feel foreign to love
Your world has a strange view
Can you tell me things that you’re dreaming of”
Power Pop represents that music is primarily for feeling feelings and the volume at which those feelings are felt or whether they’re through guitars or synths or piano or whatever, it’s all basically the same result just through different formats.
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