What Laura Says - What Laura Says Thinks and Feels
What Laura Says
What Laura Says Thinks and Feels
Terpsikhore; 2008
One of the defining characteristics of classic pop music is its propensity to not take itself too seriously, but still be able to stand up as serious music that can be respected by a serious musician. Yet, without pointing too many fingers, suffice to say that modern pop music has failed the average music fan. From overly slick production tricks to a propensity for cross-platform marketing that’s gone from obnoxious to ubiquitous in the past decade, media gurus have denuded pop music of its inherent sense of playfulness and replaced it with a shtick that resembles fun, but is really a drive for dollars wrapped in a cheap smile. Sure, business types have always sought to make a buck (or a few million) off a talented singer or band, but it’s only in recent years that the artists have truly become willing and complicit participants in the project to reduce good music to only its most marketable components (originality and thoughtfulness be damned).
The result is that bands like What Laura Says fly under the radar of most music fans or, even worse, they’re intentionally ignored, because their free-form approach to music-making is so markedly counter-intuitive to modern trends. This means, sadly, that people who really enjoy intensely joyful song-craft will most likely miss the band’s debut release, What Laura Says Thinks and Feels. This Tempe, AZ five-piece gives equal time and energy to freak-folk ditties, alt-country instrumentation, and pleasing pop palettes, resulting in an album that comes across as uncomfortably scatter-shot on the surface, but is actually a tasty, well-blended musical confection. Led by tracks like the floor-stomping sing-along “Fashionably Moral,” the piano-led “Paradice,” and the crooning “July 23,” and possessing an endorsement from Lou Reed, this music should easily find a home with fans of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Devendra Banhart, and Jana Hunter. Brilliant, esoteric pop music has a new face with What Laura Says.
