E-Mail This Article to a Friend Mac’s back Merge’s main man revamps Portastatic BY MICHAEL ALAN GOLDBERG
	Related Links Portastatic's official Web site Matt Ashare download's Portastatic's "I Wanna Know Girls."

It’s well past midnight on a recent Friday in Seattle, and toward the rear of the small stage at the Crocodile Café, Mac McCaughan — eyes closed, Stratocaster dangling against his slight frame, boyish face belying his 38 years — leans in and hovers for a second over his amplifier. And then, a blaze of distortion-laden, string-bending, whammy-bar-yanking noise erupts as he tilts backward on his heels, torso jerking left and right, nearly bashing into bandmate Jim Wilbur, and tearing the crap out of a solo as if J Mascis had just challenged him to a guitar duel. Drums are pounded wildly, a fuzzed-out bassline punches through the mix, and the nearly filled room turns electric as the faithful snap their heads around, jump up and down, and scream their approval well before the three-man, one-woman outfit onstage reaches the end of the song.

It’s exactly the kind of full-on moment you’d expect from Superchunk, the iconic, influential indie band McCaughan formed in 1989, adding Wilbur on guitar in 1990. But this is McCaughan’s other band — Portastatic. That’s Wilbur playing bass, not guitar; behind the drum kit lurks McCaughan’s brother Matt; and manning keyboards, guitar, violin, and a plethora of percussion instruments is pal Margaret White. The song they’ve just plowed through is "White Wave," from Portastatic’s seventh full-length, Bright Ideas (Merge). The album is by far the most rockist, "full band" album ever to bear the Portastatic name — a far cry from the lo-fi four-track recordings crafted almost entirely by McCaughan that characterized Portastatic’s 1994 debut, I Hope Your Heart Is Not Brittle (Merge), and most of what followed.

McCaughan’s willingness to mess with the Portastatic plot, to turn it into a more forceful, purposeful, and attention-grabbing entity rather than merely a repository for his "non-Superchunk" ideas has been met with remarkable enthusiasm. A writer in New York magazine recently concluded, after heaping a mound of praise on Bright Ideas, that McCaughan’s insistence on challenging himself at this stage of the game makes him an "unsung king of rock."

"Hyperbole like that makes me a little uncomfortable," McCaughan admits with a chuckle over his cell phone. It’s a week after the Seattle gig, and the singer-guitarist is back home in North Carolina, sitting in the Durham offices of Merge Records, the independent label he and Superchunk bassist (and onetime inamorata) Laura Ballance founded in 1989. "But I think it’s great that he loved the record, and, you know, if some people are taking the Portastatic record seriously, as opposed to, ‘Oh well, this is just a side project and I can’t wait to hear what the new Superchunk record sounds like,’ then I’m happy."

Of course, McCaughan understands that the pining for a new Superchunk album has grown ever since the band began a hiatus after 2001’s Here’s to Shutting Up. Some have begun to wonder if Superchunk are over. But Bright Ideas should make both Portastatic and Superchunk fans happy. The material ranks among McCaughan’s best, period. There are tracks as affecting as anything on Brittle (until now, Portastatic’s finest album) and others that are exuberant, clever, and craggy enough to stand proudly alongside a Superchunk classic like Foolish. "Center of the World," "The Soft Rewind," and "White Wave" provide muscle — chugging rhythms, ardent guitar solos, singalong choruses — while the mid-tempo title track and "Truckstop Cassettes" furnish atmosphere: "Bright Ideas" has a dusty desert-highway echo and tremolo guitar, "Truckstop Cassettes" an acoustic country-blues shuffle and melancholy violin. Meanwhile, "Through with People" straddles both worlds, charging forward anthemically, yet spotlighting a fluid, elegant guitar melody. As one would expect, McCaughan’s lyrics alternate between cynicism and guarded optimism, often even in the same song. "There may lie beauty ahead/That our language can’t capture at all," he sings on "Truckstop Cassettes" before conceding a few stanzas later, "I thought the worst was over/Just goes to show I shouldn’t think."

Determining that the new batch of songs required a different approach to recording, McCaughan opted to track Bright Ideas at Tiny Telephone in San Francisco (owned by his friend and fellow indie-rocker John Vanderslice). It’s the first time a Portastatic disc was hashed out in a traditional studio. "These songs were best done live, since the new songs are just more like rock-band songs, as opposed to the quieter stuff that’s on some of the other records, or the stranger things that I’ve recorded," McCaughan explains. "It was also a practical consideration in that it’s hard for me to record at home right now. I have a daughter who is two years old and I can’t make all this noise in the middle of the night anymore."

The current Portastatic tour, which comes to the Middle East this Sunday, is also a first. Prior to this outing, McCaughan had never taken Portastatic on the road as a "proper" band; the shows were mostly solo affairs. "Obviously you’d like to expand your audience, and the hope that with a record like the new one and a tour like this, it won’t just be the same people who’ve been following us all along."

As if that weren’t enough work for McCaughan, he’s continuing to handle Merge business from the road, manning his ever-present cell phone and laptop off-stage. Merge had already established itself as a modestly successful, highly respected indie label, with a catalog boasting landmark albums by Neutral Milk Hotel, the Magnetic Fields, Spoon, Lambchop, and dozens of others. But over the past couple of years, a new breed of indie acts, like the hugely hyped Montreal band the Arcade Fire and M. Ward (who played this year’s Newport Folk Festival) have brought Merge to a whole new level. The Arcade Fire’s Funeral is Merge’s biggest disc, with close to 300,000 copies sold.

"It’s amazing," McCaughan says, "but I hate to put so much importance on one release because certainly, over the years, a lot of stuff has seemed equally as special to me as that. Obviously a lot more people know about the Arcade Fire than they do the Rosebuds, but the Rosebuds album is awesome, so our job is to let all those people who are into the Arcade Fire know about the Rosebuds and Tenement Halls and Portastatic and all the other stuff we’ve got going on that they might really like."

Merge also reissued the first three Dinosaur Jr albums earlier this year in advance of that band’s unlikely reunion, and that’s had McCaughan thinking about what may transpire when, if all goes according to plan, Superchunk reconvene next year to record a new album. "God, I hope there’s not any of that hoopla. I think it’s weird when bands play ‘last shows’ and announce they’re breaking up and all that stuff unless they really know there’s no way they’re gonna get back together again. Because then it’s like, two years later they start to think, ‘Oh maybe it’d be fun to play some shows,’ and then, you know, everyone makes a big deal about the reunions. I dunno, I’d rather not have that drama. And it’s not like we dislike each other or never see each other — I see Laura in the office everyday, and Jim’s in Portastatic, you know? So we’ll see what happens. There’s always so much going on, things pulling me this way and that way, but right now I’m happy focusing on Portastatic."

Portastatic + John Vanderslice | Middle East Downstairs, 480 Mass Ave, Cambridge | Oct 16 | 617.864.EAST