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Boyracer:
Happenstance
When our intergalactic overlords finally land on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. with intentions to enslave us once and for all, they may very well ask the first earthling in falling apart Chuck Taylors and an undersized, gleefully ironic t-shirt for the best indie rock record ever made. It seems that while all of the high powered radio stations have been pumping the latest boy bands and Debbie Gibson singles into outer space for decades, pirate radio and college stations are a little too underpowered to make the signals go the distance, so our alien masters probably will have never heard indie rock. They very well may be interested in correcting this horrible omission once they land. What record would you give them? Bee Thousand? Slanted and Enchanted? All too obvious, perhaps. It might be better to confuse our tripod-riding, raygun-toting, human-eating visitors with something a little weirder, say early Jesus and Mary Chain or maybe one of those atrocious Sebadoh records. (Finding the worst would be the challenge). Whatever ones nefarious motives might be, a Boyracer record would be a pretty good choice. Any way you slice it, Boyracer combines all the best elements of indie rock from the last 20 years or so into a digestible morsels of songs that go down in a minute or so. I know what you are thinkingGuided by Voices, right? Wrong. Guided by Voices, however good they may have been at times, always took a baseball-style philosophy to making records. In baseball, if you strike out two out of three times, you can still be a great player. GBV records would be mostly crap, with a couple of songs so great that you would forget how crappy the songs leading up to it were. Fun as it may have been to confuse your little brother with GBV records, there was always something missing. Dont get me wrong, I love GBV, but come on; a band that has released about a million songs has a lot of stinkers. Not so for Boyracer. Their new album, Happenstance has countem 23 tracks that fly by at 90 seconds or less on average. If this were a GBV record, we would find about four, maybe five really great songs that you would make your non-believer friends listen to. Happenstance, on the other hand, is 90% excellent. Sure, there are a couple of stinkers here, but not many. The good tracks are often genuinely poignant, and while our alien friends may or may not have emotions, even they couldnt help but be touched by the fragile intensity of Boyracer. Boyracer has been making noisy pop excellence for years, but it took them a long time to put out this record, and it shows. Even though most of the songs display the same aesthetic sense that was present on early Pavement seven-inches, they mix it up on this album, adding different styles of arrangements and different instruments like a little piano here and there. This Arizona via U.K. band sounds like a rocking Belle and Sebastian played on a broken car stereo or an energetic version of the Smiths without Morrissey, who invested in really crappy amps and cant figure out how to keep the feedback down. So throw out all your other records, because you dont need them any more. Prepare to worship at the altar of Boyracer with or without our alien slave drivers looking over our shoulders all the time. Who knows? Intergalactic slavery might not seem so bad with Happenstance playing in the background.
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