Austin – Ultimate Painting was introduced to me as a supergroup. Not in those words, but there must have been some hope that name-dropping Veronica Falls and Mazes would entice me to listen to their music. I’m not sure if, by the strictest definition, there can be such a thing as an indie supergroup. The members of Atoms For Peace, The Raconteurs, Monsters of Folk, and so on, had long-since overcome whatever marginality might still be associated with “indie.” James Hoare and Jack Cooper haven’t got quite that reputation, except maybe with scrupulous anglophiles and whoever still gets NME delivered to their home. Which isn’t really a bad thing. Supergroups have some kind of narcissistic syndrome, musicians cooking up a bland average of the music that made them famous (see Atoms For Peace).
Sometimes it works though, in a really weird way. Traveling Wilburys is “dad music” up and down, both out of place in the same era as Surfer Rosa & alternative rock, and literally the only record your parents bought from 1986 to 1994. Still, it was a jam; your parents were right about something! (Maybe they were right about Simon & Garfunkel, too?)
Besides having been pitched to me as “the dudes from these bands,” this is why I can’t help thinking “supergroup” when I listen to Ultimate Painting, the eponymous debut album, out this week on Trouble In Mind Records. These songs are unmistakably 90’s, but they do better than imitating the music that’s fallen way to the back of my playlists—Pavement, Elliot Smith, Modest Mouse—it’s a solid reiteration that makes me want to return to that music, and sends me to even deeper sources—The Clean and Teenage Fanclub, and Animals That Swim. This record features quiet productions, resigned lyrics, clear-but-distant vocals, and a sense that the pace of the music is always lagging behind the actual tempo. As well as it reproduces the sound of the 90’s, it seems also to understand its ambitions.
Album opener “Ultimate Painting” announces this commitment to 90’s sounds in its first five seconds, with note-bent guitar melody that stands out against turned-down bass, clean, simple backbeat, and a progression that holds off from resolving into an easy, hooky chord. The band called it a vague theme song, which I’d more or less agree with. The lyrics here are in the best tradition of the hazy stream-of-consciousness narration in Nirvana and REM. As far as it has an identifiable theme, there’s plenty of suggestion in the lines “I don’t ever wanna shout,” and “Stopping everything that flows.” It matches the pace of the music, at least.
As if it weren’t obvious enough already, second track “Can’t You See” dons Roman Candle era Elliot Smith. Not “Say Yes,” more the songs with a bluesy melancholy that fail to resolve fully one way or the other. This counter-climactic tendency is the real line of continuity between these songs, and it seems to be how Ultimate Painting pulls together their different source material. It also fills out the guitar/bass/drums arrangement slightly, allowing space for a piano that rises in the back of the mix in the song’s second half.
It also helps that they stick close to those two formats—the higher-tempo tracks with ambiguous atmosphere, and the straight-up indulgent sadness of Elliot Smith. Not that those are mutually exclusive. “Rolling In The Deep End” puts a dark edge on Ultimate Painting, with a tough-to-pull-off minor hook equal to “House of the Rising Sun.” If the song flags, it’s in the lyrics. “It’s all instant gratification, throw away your opinion” and “You see them in the magazine, you’re paralyzed/you wanna be just like them, gun in hand,” seems to want to make a point. And while I suspect there’s something deeper than “No one’s thinking for themselves” (thanks, dad), it’s too obscure to wash the bad taste out of my mouth. Still, it’s one of the best moping-tracks on the record.
When the band springs for prettiness, they do it excellently. And they do it just enough to relieve the unrelentingly oppressive atmosphere that always kept me from fully embracing Elliot Smith and Pavement. They find a locus for something like hopefulness that fills out the record’s tone, giving it a complexity belied by the simplicity of the songwriting and arrangement.
Here they get closer to Jack Cooper’s wheelhouse. James Hoare’s work with Mazes is a pretty obvious predecessor to the material on Ultimate Painting, but Cooper’s Veronica Falls background finds a place in “Winter In Your Heart” and “Talking Central Park Blues.” The latter has a true, audible rhythm guitar scratching out a lovely hook. This song also tells a story more clearly than any of the other material here. An out-of-towner wandering through what’s left of New York’s pre-Giuliani grime, meeting a special someone, and refraining, properly a little too early in this relationship, “I want to be alone with you.”
“She’s a Bomb” has a much fuller production than anything else here, with organs and some noise-screech at points. It also has aspirations to something more experimental, maybe a reference to the 60’s counterculture they derive their name from. Those screeches, the de-tuning effect early in the song, and the closing spoken-word sample that calls back to “Talking Central Park Blues” conspire to mask a song that’s all pop—a lovely progression, for-once audible and catchy bass, and a structure that brings together the song’s best attributes for a climactic chorus.
“Winter In Your Heart” probably takes honors for favorite track. This low-tempo bass/drum/guitar ballad easily gives you the best series of hooks on the record, articulated together without intervening tension, and a love song with a fairly consistent message. “Nobody wants to be here.” It perfectly fits into the niche “Rolling In The Deep End” just barely misses.
By their own account, the band came about the old-fashioned way—crossing paths at shows, promising to record sometime, actually recording and sort of liking it. It recalls the failed aspiration of 90’s music to never to play to more than a few dozen people, and the band successfully brings much of what was good about that music—the intimacy of late afternoon, slanted-light songs. This band may be destined for side-project status, with Veronica Falls and Mazes having greater prior success and more marketable songs (also, more Google-able names; try it). But if it means more people will listen to Ultimate Painting, I’ll plug Veronica Falls and Mazes every chance I get.
Ultimate Painting is on the final leg of a tour, so if you happen to be in London this weekend, don’t miss them.
Sean Kayden
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