Hollywood, Alaska
Champagne Downtown
East Side Digital; 2009
There are times when I want to walk up to a fancy reflecting pool and kick a little bit of sand or dirt into it to add a bit of flavor and texture. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the clean lines of architecture, the ambience of the pristine environment, or the chance to rest my mind gazing into the still waters. I do – but I occasionally feel the need to sully the perfection as a means of adding in a bit of realism.
Those same urges wash over me when listening to the music of Hollywood, Alaska on the Minnesota band’s new record, Champagne Downtown. The album easily calls to mind the mellow, slightly moody side of ‘80s pop as interpreted through the ears of a contemporary indie-rock musician. Silky-smooth synthesizers and programming are matched with an excellent drummer and then pared with a singer with obvious Ben Gibbard influences, both in vocal and lyrical stylings. This is an extremely talented band with heaps of pop acumen, but something seems lacking in the overall sound.
Maybe it’s the hyper-clean guitars, typically preferring phaser and delay over distortion, that bother me, or it could be the band’s pitch-and-tone-perfect brand of pop. But the album seems a bit too refined for my palette, similar to my preference for raw brown sugar over granulated white sugar. I am not arguing for a band to dumb down its collective musical intelligence and play its songs with less ability, but there is something to be said for permitting the slightest imperfections to appear to have a more organic appeal.
This is not to say that Champagne Downtown isn’t worth more than a few listens. My favorite track on the record, “The Hollywood Sign,” contains the stellar line, “I say we burn down the Hollywood Sign and tear apart the judges with our bare hands,” which is one of the best expressions of revulsion I’ve heard regarding the way our society is driven by a needless media frenzy. “In Order,” “The Ends,” and “Un-American” are swimming in rich layers of melancholy that are covered by syrupy bass lines and topped with delectable beats.
More bands should take lessons from Hollywood, Alaska, in terms of learning how to play their instruments and compose a high-quality anthem. But as I currently perceive it, the ambitious song lengths stretch on too far for classic pop and the group’s overall sound it a bit too spotless for rock. In the future, I would like to see this group toss a few handfuls of grit to slightly sully the mix and then watch this gifted act contend with the disturbance.