It’s a relatively rare thing, that perfectly memorable pop song that isn’t irreducibly a product of its time, a cultural artifact destined to seem hoary and pathetic when repackaged with other relics on a Now That’s What I Call Music! compilation numbering in the upper hundreds.  Certainly, the oft-mentioned classix necessarily jump to mind: yes, cuts from the Beatles, the Stones, James Brown, the best of Chess and Motown, Zeppelin (although those weren’t singles proper, but the point is made), “Roundabout,” Prince, Radiohead, Outkast all number among those that deserve immediate inclusion, but what was the last blow-up-big single track that seemed destined for anything but a momentary fire-dance into oblivion?

It certainly wasn’t Crazy, MIA’s ubiquitously irritating Paper Planes (and so it is that the Clash becomes a band that someone sampled, that one of the fiercest rock’n’roll engines of the half-century of the music’s lifespan loses its corporeal body and is consigned to shit-referential ether…le sigh), or any of the insidious sewage to run from the putrid ‘round-back streams of the Gwen Stefani/Pharrell Williams Corporation.  We’d have to wayback it at the very least to Hey Ya and 2004, and even that little gem is looking played out in the age of Bush’s admission to have sanctioned torture; if one were to hear the phrase “shake it like a Polaroid picture” resounding among the university quads (or, daresay I, cubicle arrangements) of the Western world, it would almost certainly be accompanied with a fair dose of irony.

All of this lead-in comes by way of mentioning that Harmonia, the remarkable lead track from the Shortwave Set’s debut LP Replica Sun Machine, may be the first such song in at least half a decade.  An instantly ingratiating track that proves its durability over a dark-night week or two, Harmonia is a collision of ominous piano chords, Leslie-speaker vocals, and a pure 1967 descending-bass hook to make the Left Banke or We All Together blush.  Though the Brit trio (Andrew Pettitt, Ulrika Bjorsne, and David Farrell) came out of nowhere for yrs truly, Replica arrives with all the necessary pedigree marks of a thoroughly classicist retro-pop education: there are moments that are uncannily reminiscent of a more bummed-out Magical Mystery Tour Fabs, as if the polarities of internal influence had been reversed Lennon and McCartney had followed in the menacing-stoned-reverie direction of Harrison’s Blue Jay Way (dig House of Lies for a taste of arguably the best song that Lennon never wrote before utterly losing the plot), and both John Cale and Van Dyke Parks were involved in the gestation of l’objet.  Less in the line of the Nuggets fetishist par excellence comes the production job courtesy Danger Mouse, he of late Gnarls Barkley and Grey Album mashup fame; I presume that his presence is audible in the postmodern/hip-hop production aesthetic of the record, the way that the standard elements of Baroque-psych get reconfigured in a sampladelic haze, the way that brief plopping chords on a Hammond organ become sonar blips and fuzzy bass encroaches on clubby Moog-squelch territory.

In saying something to the effect that a band can be “uncannily reminiscent of the Beatles,” there is an immediate implication that the music at hand is basically a historical reconstruction, the work of a group of enthusiastic record geeks who re-make/re-model all their favorite obscure ’65-’69 singles into a pastiche-werk that’s fun and skillful but ultimately unrewarding: playing spot-the-influence, no matter how profound a group’s knowledge of arcane and forgotten gold, only goes so far.  This is not true of Replica Sun Machine, but the reason for its unique longevity is difficult to pin down.  There is of course the pure strength of the songwriting; this must be figured in, but it doesn’t serve as a complete explanation.  Perhaps the best descriptor of the album’s appeal is also the highest compliment that can be given a group that clearly recalls a specific bygone era in popular music: the Shortwave Set doesn’t sound like a band from the ‘60s, it sounds like a band in the ‘60s, which is to say that Replica works with the free-wheeling, all-intake energy of a band working in the dynamic flow of a vital sonic environment rather than with the discerning but ultimately sterile assemblage of, let us say, early Of Montreal (to speak not a word of Kevin Barnes’ more recent monstrosities). 

It’s easy to forget, in a critically retrospective era in which every minute variation on any musical theme is branded for specialized sale as soon as possible (Emo! Screamo! Emo-pop! Emo-punk! Emocore! Emo-metal! Julian Bream-o! Mirrors and steam-o!), that—to use a relevant example—the Beatles, the Soft Machine, Curtis Mayfield, the Kinks, Isaac Hayes, Bob Dylan, and the Stones probably considered themselves more or less of a piece under the heading of “progressive music” in their (partially shared) heyday; it is only an element of analytical dissection that they are later categorized by categories that they themselves created. 

This is not necessarily a negative impulse, but it creates a meaningless critical tendency to draw artificial lines between Yes and Television, between the Incredible String Band and the Stooges, between Faust and Funkadelic.  The Shortwave Set refuses this sort of free-samples-here categorizing; none of Replica seems as if assembled from the ready archetypes of the subgenres which have been identified as constituents of the musical era that is clearly the band’s primary influence.  Harpischords, swooping string arrangements (courtesy the always interesting Parks), Subcontinental buzzes and drones, Mellotrons, and Pro Tools trickery of the Nigel Godrich/Dave Fridmann school are all applied as they fit the songs, not as they serve to recreate a genre or build a gimmick by combining two of them.  Simply, Replica Sun Machine is a damn good pop record, very possibly the best of the last several years, and one that arrives like an autumn breeze in the faux debaucherie pseudo-Bacchanal and po-faced “eccentricity” of the Pitchfork-approved set.

Release date: 05/05/08
Artist website: www.theshortwaveset.com
Label: Wall of Sound

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