Track Star
(Better Looking Records)
Track Star’s Lion Destroyed the Whole World is the perfect album to have lying around in a passive-aggressive household serving as battleground for the end of a relationship. The whole album, especially the first track, is like a loaded fucking gun for a couple that isn’t ready to come out and say "You suck" to each other.
Obviously, it’s an album full of love songs. The opening track, "Feet First," being the most vicious. It’s the singer’s preemptive strike on his girl at the end of their thing. "I know to expect the worst/So when it falls apart I’m gonna land on my feet first." At the song’s start, a shifty guitar line barely makes itself known before the slow, breathy vocal fills the room: "Here comes the hardest part/But I don’t need you, I can break my own heart." Wyatt Cusick uses his gentle throat to swagger through this track. He sounds almost pitiful, then turns it into a fuck-you. But his smooth, throaty whisper makes the whole thing come off as a bait-and-switch kind of seduction. The refrain blows up from the sparse arrangement with "I don’t wanna fight/’Cause I know what’s right." Like he just slapped her with the perfect last word and now she’s watching him walk away and worrying that she’s fucked it all up.
Play this at any given moment when the two of you are in the same room and it will be met with a "Why’d you play that?" Whether you just fought and lost, you wanna fight but don’t know about what or everything’s going shockingly great for the first time in a couple weeks and you wanna shake things up. The third verse latches onto a new melody, a singsongy lullaby: "So we’re strangers again after all we’ve been through/’Cause only strangers would act the way I act with you." "Why’d you play that?"
Why do you think?
"Because it’s a pretty song. What?"
The sentiment of "Feet First" rises up between you and your lover like a fart for which no one wants to accept blame. It tiptoes into your bedroom like that elephant that hangs around the dinner table of an alcoholic father, except the elephant in this case doesn’t represent alcoholism so much as one party’s impotence/frigidity. Try it in your home!
The rest of the album is like a textbook for kissoffs. The second song is a jolly rocker, its refrain punctuated with the shimmery fireworks borrowed from Stone Roses’ "She Bangs the Drums" (which they borrowed from the Who’s entire catalog). "You can always tell just why I act the way I do/Every time I go you know that I’ll run back to you." Right after that one Track Star delivers a true heartbreaker, "Green to Gold." It’s another shuffling tempo underneath Cusick’s heartthrob voice. Just like "Feet First," no warning is given; the track opens with "I woke up/And I found/That I’d lost the feeling long ago/But it’s hard/To give up/’Cause everything’s just so comfortable." And it just goes on and on like that, line after line of (shudder) honesty. Suddenly the asshole can lay his cards all over the table and say what he’s thinking, now that all he can think about is: "And the writer was right/There is hope/Just not for us/So it goes/What can you say/When you know/Everything fades/Green to gold."
"Why’d you play that?"
If you actually go to the trouble of playing track three specifically, you’re being pretty direct and someone might end up moving out within the hour. At least if you start with track one, you can pretend the disc just happened to be the next one in the changer. Don’t bring a gun to a knife fight, s’what I’m saying.
There are more rockers to follow, many sounding a bit like later Sebadoh tunes, perhaps owing to Matthew Troy’s grimy vocals, and of course the lyrics all about heartbreak and "Man, did I ever fuck up again." The tracks fly by, several at just under two minutes. Track Star wraps you up in their thick basslines and once they’ve got you in their grip they jam spoonfuls of sugary guitar chords in between your lips.
I haven’t caught them live yet, but when I do they’d better play "Something to Do" or I’m gonna hit a kid. It’s a full-on, blast-off rocker, the vocals just barely hanging on as the guitars speed away. (Yeah, it’s about hearts getting ripped apart.) It’s got those shimmery guitar blasts and sudden, quadruple-speed tempos that leave you with whiplash at the end of the two minutes plus.
"Amy Tell Me Why" may be a pretty simple track, but opening up with "Amy tell me why/You wanna start a band/’Cause I’ve got a song in my head," it’s one of the more inventive variations on their "Please Don’t Go" songs. Just before the closing rocker, "Cities on Cities," we’re offered the beautiful "The End," and the last word is spoken. "No matter what you do/I’ve given up on you/No matter what you say/I’m leavin’ you today." A sad guitar line echoes from far off, trying to touch hands with the barest of rhythm sections, and they meet at the chorus where a chick finally gets a word in edgewise with Alicia Vanden Heuvel’s fragile voice sharing the harmony: "And if you wanna fight about it/Then I could go the night without it/’Cause this is the end."
Track Star was on the road with the Shins for much of this summer. An appropriate pairing, as both bands recently released brief records overflowing with quick bursts of fucking beautiful pop. Hopefully, Track Star will soon share in the accolades the Shins have been enjoying this past year. While the Shins’ fantastic record Know Your Onion clearly owes a huge debt to Ray Davies (practically a royalty check), Track Star only have their love of indie rock and 60s pop and flailing-on-the-floor love songs to fall back on. With Track Star, the misery is wrapped up in a candy wrapper, the melodies so pretty and the harmonies so sweet. You want a taste.
