The Shins

Oh, Inverted World
Sub Pop, 2001

There is nothing more pathetic than watching local music critics scramble over one another for review copies of the latest trendy North American indie album. It's not that I think all Australian critics should be obligated to write about homegrown bands, but there is something tragic about the delusion that their opinions are important or even relevant when it comes to the Next Big Thing from overseas. As a general rule, no one cares what Australians think about the music scene in New York any more than The Beatles agonized over their reviews in The Times Of India. And in the age of instant access to overseas tastemakers like Pitchfork and Drowned In Sound, there are fewer and fewer reasons for local readers to either.

There are a hundred albums I could have picked as examples for this week's column but for some reason The Shins stood out the most. The consummate band for middle-class white kids who fret over boys and girls they haven't met yet while sipping tea and trying on cardigans, The Shins somehow became Bigger Than Jesus among local critics on the strength of their debut album Oh, Inverted World, before Natalie Portman stomped all over their credibility in the film Garden State. "You've got to hear this one song, it'll change your life," she urged, in the least sincere performance of her career, managing in the process to highlight what an absurd suggestion it was that a flaccid 1960s pop regurgitation could be life-changing! anyway.

The point isn't that The Shins are bad, it's just that they're not all that good. It is amazing, but sadly also quite commonplace, that some sub-par band from overseas can manage to enthral music critics thousands of kilometres away with one or two unremarkable albums. What lies beneath the gushing reviews of The Shins and other trendy foreign bands is the subconscious belief that real pop music can only be made in North America or England, and thus the uncritical acceptance of what's hot and what's not from those who are based there. For at least the last few years, local "best of year" lists have read as if they were taken straight from the pages of Spin or Uncut. Even if you don't take that as a sign of our cultural cringe, isn't there a good argument for doing something different?

The Slits

Cut
Island, 1979

"Electrifying" is one of those dreadfully overused words hauled out at every opportunity to sell bands and their records (usually by writers on consignment and full-time publicists, who are responsible for wearing out most good words, rather irresponsibly if you ask me) and so it doesn't really mean what it should anymore, which is that facial twitch of a smile that pulls your cheeks back across your face without warning and comes with a flutter of nerves over the top of your brain like a tiny rain of pins and needles - that feeling you get when you hear a band that are just something else, and that I got last when I first heard post-punk band The Slits take apart the classic Motown track 'Heard It Through The Grapevine' and put it back together again as a demented disco-reggae floorkiller.

Like a lot of people my age, I was introduced to Marvin Gaye's version of 'Heard It Through The Grapevine' on the various copies of The Big Chill soundtrack that my parents wore out while I was growing up. It was a proper song, elegant and full-bodied, with so much heart, a premise so universal and a melody so infallible that it rose above petty concepts like taste to become one of those tracks I simply couldn't imagine being fucked with, which is of course exactly what The Slits did in 1979 by turning it into a dancefloor hit by humming the rhythm into a microphone and looping it, replacing the chorus with a hissed "I heard it through the ba-ss!line" in one spot and skipping a beat in another and, you know, just generally trampling all over the damn thing like it was a throwaway collection of hooks and words to be reorganised at whim by whoever had a passing interest in doing so. It was released as the B-side to their first single 'Typical Girls', which I don't imagine is particularly easy to track down anymore, but you can also find it tacked onto the latest reissue of their debut album Cut, along with the rest of their thrilling crimes against proper music that, sadly, I've run out of space to talk about. Check out the sample on 'Newtown' that sounds like a match being struck in slow motion.

Weezer

The Blue Album
Geffen, 1994

The modern successors to The Modern Lovers were Weezer. The Lovers grew out of singer Jonathan Richman's infatuation with gutter chic pioneers The Velvet Underground, but plied a more accessible and radio-friendly style of rock and roll about girls, cars and Pablo Picasso. Twenty years later Weezer sprung up like a dorky flower in the wake of the grunge explosion and plied a more accessible and radio-friendly style of rock and roll about girls, surfing and Buddy Holly. Their eponymous debut, commonly called The Blue Album, was released a few weeks after Kurt Cobain's death and together with that event signalled the end of the collective downer that had spread outwards from Seattle like spilt chloroform during the early '90s. Ethan Hawke's woeful performance in Reality Bites probably didn't help either.

The Blue Album's first single was a nonsensical pop hit called 'Undone - The Sweater Song', which seemed to be about clothes unravelling at a party. Between sing-along choruses, the song had a tender guitar chime that echoed around the studio and allowed it to pluck at more heartstrings than a track about knitwear should. Singer Rivers Cuomo later said he was frustrated by the public's reaction to it. "It was supposed to be a sad song, but everyone thinks it's hilarious," he told a biographer. The confusion over whether Weezer were a novelty band or misunderstood nerds continued with the film clip to their second single 'Buddy Holly', which showed them performing on the set of Happy Days tottering up and down in matching outfits like bobblehead dolls.

But the third single, a heavy rock tearjerker called 'Say It Ain't So', was more straightforward. With crunching guitars and open-ended lyrics about a misfortune of one sort or another, it was vague enough to become the anthem for the woes of a million teenage boys and girls and is still remembered fondly by almost everyone I know. Unlike the grunge songs of the generation before, at the single's heart was the same crisp and unashamedly catchy pop melodies that drove the rest of the album. It set the style for Weezer's second and best record Pinkerton, which was released two years later to far better reviews and far fewer sales.

The Modern Lovers

The Modern Lovers
Beserkley, 1976

The Modern Lovers pass the living room test. They are one of those esteemed and regularly namedropped old bands who are actually fun to listen to as well – enough that my girlfriend, whose last purchase was a Coldplay album, doesn't reach for her ear plugs when I put them on. Record shop nerds and music critics are always trying to convince people who will listen to them to learn about boring – "but important!" – old bands to get their pop music fan club membership, or "know" where some sound came from, or whatever. Unless you're a big fan of their respective genres, or you know you'll actually enjoy them, you really don't need to own anything by The Stooges, The Byrds or Captain Beefheart to enjoy contemporary music. The only exception to this rule is the Pixies. Everone reading this column needs to own a copy of Surfer Rosa, otherwise you're out of the club.

But back to The Modern Lovers. They were formed in Boston in 1970 by Jonathan Richman, a wide-eyed kid infatuated with The Velvet Underground but who was far too nice to follow in the footsteps of his gutter-dwelling idols. Instead of heroin and hookers, Richman wrote about pining after girls and listening to the radio. The band recorded most of their debut The Modern Lovers in '73 but it wasn't released until three years later, by which time Richman had already grown tired of it, broken up the band and swapped his electric guitar for an acoustic one. He released a few later albums with another band called The Modern Lovers, but none were as good as the debut.

On one track Richman concocts an absurd story about Pablo Picasso cruising through the suburbs picking up girls in a Cadillac Eldorado, that famous American car with little fins above the tail-lights. "Some people try to pick up girls," Richman complains, "and get called assholes! This never happened to Pablo Picasso!" The other great songs are 'Roadrunner', a bouncy pop remake of The Velvet Underground classic 'Sister Ray', and probably their best known cut 'She's Cracked' – an even better demo version of which, and I'm going to put on my music nerd hat here, recorded during the John Cale sessions in '72, is floating around on compilations. If anyone ever pressures you to listen to The Velvet Underground, get this instead. You'll actually enjoy it.