Get Lucky (no, not the Loverboy album)
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My critical faculties are temporarily out of service. They have been completely undone by the new Nada Surf album, Lucky.I think they wanted to tell you something about how you can really forget their annoying hit "Popular" of 12 years ago, and something else about how this is a better Teenage Fanclub record than Teenage Fanclub has ever recorded. (And both I and my critical faculties like Teenage Fanclub a lot.)My critical faculties were trying to get some distance from the music so as to offer a dispassionate appraisal of this album. But there's nothing dispassionate about my response to this record. I simply love it. For one thing, it's rare that a record is as beautiful as this one. We value a lot of things in popular music: "catchy," "rockin'" "funky" "danceable"; but "beautiful" seldom makes the list. The sound is lush and complex, and the album is crammed to the edges with beauty: melodies, harmonies, backing vocals, cello parts - many tracks are so pretty it almost hurts to listen to them. Even now, as I make swoony goo-goo eyes at my computer while I type this and "See These Bones" plays, I'm getting some very strange looks from my fellow coffee shop patrons. But this is what love does: it makes you ridiculous. (When I reread this in six months, I'm sure I'll be cringing at my earnestness; but, for now, I'm going irony free.)Of course, the music is only half the story; the lyrics hit me where I live--in that strange bittersweet zone where joy and sadness meet. The album is packed with images of death, loss, and sadness: "just like we are, you'll be dust," "ice is growing on the wings," "everyone's got to leave their love sometime." But this is no mopefest; it's catchy, it rocks, and it proves, in an unassuming, unpretentious way that popular art and great art can be the same thing.
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