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The
Blow: Bonus Album
The sound of the Blow is that of two sisters, one 14-year-old and one 11-year-old. They live on a farm without television and are sheltered from crime, poverty, and sex. They like to write songs and sing them together, but their parents cant afford instruments, so they clap along instead, or sometimes dad will play his old nylon-string acoustic guitar. Theyve got pretty good voices, but havent really mastered the whole harmonization thing yet. They write songs about what they know: candy and schoolgirl crushes. Their songs are simply pretty and pretty simple. If this album really was by a 14-year-old girl and an 11-year-old girl, it would be impressive. But it isnt; its by an adult woman named Khaela Maricich, a frequent Microphones collaborator and part of the whole Olympia/Anacortes scene. As with many other K Records artists, theres an air of innocence here, an ignorance of the modern world and its inconveniences, focusing instead on nature and personal relations. Some, like the Microphones, can pull this off by exuding a wistfulness that reflects a self-awareness of the anachronistic character of their music. Others, like the Blow, insist on playing this naivet straight, a move that either makes them seem disingenuous or hopelessly out of touch with the world. The most egregious example of this is the final track on Bonus Album, called Little Sally Tutorial, in which Little Miss Maricich instructs us on how to play a traditional schoolgirl dance game. Then we get to listen to her and her best pals play! Hooray! Ok, never mind that. Since this is a CD, we cant see them dancing. Its still grating and condescending. The rest of the album is 50% ok and 50% annoying cutesy-pie bullshit. Some Chocolates is enjoyable, a short and simple ditty made up of two vocal tracks and handclaps. The Moon is There, I Am Here is the strongest song lyrically but degenerates into pseudo-Van Morrison word repetition at the end. Watch the Water Roll Up benefits from more fleshed-out production, distinguishing it from the minimalism of the rest of the tracks. Maricich insists on attempting to sing way out of her range on many of the songs, leading to some fairly off-key harmonies (if I notice them, they must be pretty off-key). In the Microphones, these sour notes get buried under the 20 other voices involved, but here they are obvious without the cushion of more talented peers. The other problem is the forced naivet. These songs are so sweet they make my teeth hurt. Im not saying that every band has to have songs about convenience store robberies gone wrong or meth lab explosions, but this glorification of an idealized childhood that never was is pretty pathetic. You cant escape aging. You and all of your family and friends are going to get old and die. All of the dance parties in the world arent going to change that.
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