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Looking good
Fred Thomas’s songs for simpler times
BY CARLY CARIOLI

On the day that Phil Spector was arrested for murder, several of Fred Thomas’s friends e-mailed him to see whether he’d heard the news. In Ann Arbor — and, increasingly, in other places as well — Thomas is known as a bit of a Phil Spector freak. All Your Summer Songs (Polyvinyl), the dreamy, lovelorn new disc by his group Saturday Looks Good to Me, is a testament to his obsession. The 25-year-old Thomas wrote, arranged, and recorded the album on a four-track over a span of two years in six cities with 17 musicians and 11 different singers (including members of Ida, His Name Is Alive, Outrageous Cherry, and Retsin), after studying the work of idiosyncratic ’60s producers from Shadow Morton and Joe Meek to Lee Perry. The meticulous craftsmanship of Summer Songs sounds like an unearthed treasure trove of vintage Detroit pop — imagining a Motown where, as Secret Stars’ Jodi VB and mod-pop heartthrob Ted Leo sing on "Ambulance," "The ghosts of factory workers dance/With the ghosts of kids who never had a chance." The touring version of the group, which has been known to include as many as a dozen members, plays the Middle East next Thursday.

Thomas’s songs are at once compulsively catchy and preciously sentimental, danceable and sad — not since Belle and Sebastian have Smiths-loving depressives had as good an excuse to shake loose their inner Martha Reeves. Filled with melodramatic self-examination and boozy late-night confession and the odd hip-hop freestyle verse, the on-line diary Thomas kept while making the album (http://ypsilanti.diaryland.com) displays all the hallmarks of hopeless emo-kid romanticism, and so does Summer Songs. He writes about the awkward couplings and break-ups of boys and girls in lyrics that evoke the first mad, nervous, exhilarating rush of infatuation as well as the confusion, paranoia, and emotional intrigue that inevitably follow. "What have you heard about me from those kids I always see you hanging out with? What kind of gossip and calculations?" demands Outrageous Cherry’s Matthew Smith on "No Good with Secrets."

The title track, on which Thomas is joined by Retsin’s Cynthia Nelson and Tara Jane O’Neil, reads like a note passed between doomed high-school sweethearts: "Are we breaking up? Should we break up?" On "Underwater Heartbeat," an up-tempo sax-and-organ-driven bubblegum R&B tune that could be the Coasters covering Neutral Milk Hotel, SLGTM’s resident female foil, Erika Hoffman (formerly of Gadzuki and His Name Is Alive), coos, "Sit me on your front porch and sing me something sweet until I fall asleep." But her boy wants to move too fast, he’s always "sleeping with the past," and she lets their spring fling lapse. Later, on "Ultimate Stars," a song that channels the Supremes’ swooning shuffle with an uncanny precision, Hoffman delivers the ultimate luckless lover’s plea: "If I don’t see you soon/I’ll have to find another game to lose."

Like Stephin Merritt, to name another indie-pop impresario who’s more comfortable hiding in the wings of his songs, Thomas has a knack for taking a genre and running with it. His skillful arrangements, like Motown’s and Spector’s "wall of sound," are built up layer by layer, and he relies on some of the most distinctive signatures of ’50s dance music and ’60s girl-group pop: heavy backbeats, sloshing tambourines, and short, punchy sax duets; reverb-drenched guitars, roller-rink organ, playful flute filigrees, and nursery-rhyme vibraphone chimes. On "Sun Doesn’t Want To Shine," his duet with Ida/K. singer Karla Schickele, he’s as convincing summoning up the devotional doo-wop of the Platters’ "Only You" in the intro as he is at re-creating the bittersweet kiss-offs of Beggars Banquet–era Stones when the pair’s accusatory, sour-mash harmonies bloom: "It won’t take as long as you think to forget about me."

"Sing to me," Jodi and Leo duet on "Ambulance," "don’t let me fall asleep/To the sound of cold machines/Or the smell of gasoline." There’s an abiding adolescent innocence to Summer Songs, in its enduring faith in the homeopathic healing power of a sad song, and in the almost quaint, American Bandstand ideal of dancing as pop’s most sacred teenage ritual. "Meet me by the water underneath the big beehive/Bring your record player and your Raincoats 45s," sings Jodi, by herself, on "Meet Me by the Water," as if this simple act might solve everything: "We can dance together as the river rushes by/To wash away the cities that somebody else designed." The city is an alien complex, cold and sinister. But the music is the ghost of a secret hideaway where the kids stay out all night, and the chorus, "Dance with me/Beneath the circuitry," beckons us to a simpler, safer place.

Saturday Looks Good to Me appear next Thursday, July 24, at the Middle East, 472 Massachusetts Avenue in Central Square; call (617) 864-EAST.


Issue Date: July 18 - 24, 2003
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