Saturday Looks Good To Me

Every Night
Polyvinyl, 2004

My favourite tools in the trade of twee pop are whimsy and wordplay, and of course any such song worth its weight in second-hand cardigans would also have to be written by a well-off white kid who bruised liked a ripe pear. It has been a guilty pleasure of mine ever since falling in love with Belle & Sebastian, who inspired a revival of the genre in the late '90s with a series of records about love and books and minor dramas given motion-picture proportions with lush pop orchestra soundtracks to boot.

Another guilty pleasure, which seems to have become popular in indie music at around the same time and since, is self-referential lyrics (oh so po-mo, I know). Like wordplay it is the sort of thing that appeals to bookish types with fidgety minds who love nothing more than to get swept up in the analysis of everything and anything, as long as there is some minor detail to debate. And for such a person who also loves music, what could be more fascinating than a pop song that deconstructs itself as it spins?

And so we come to a track by Michigan indie band Saturday Looks Good To Me called 'When The Party Ends', from their third album Every Night, which combines all of the above to create four minutes of delightful nerdiness. It's written like a letter between young lovers who constantly miss the bus in the morning and feel misunderstood at night, with eloquent lines that keep becoming longer and more frantic as the tempo picks up and the sappy string instruments kick in.

About half-way through the song trips over its tongue for a second and then changes tack entirely, to become a diatribe on marketers who "know the demographic that we represent/ Because they heard all of our secrets through the heating vent" and, then, the songwriter himself. "So write another song about your discontent/ And wax nostalgic for a time less turbulent," he sings, like a jab in his own ribs, and then, my very favourite taunt: "And you can use your list of words that rhyme with opulent." It is a tiny, private protest, the musical equivalent of thumping your pillow and then feeling a bit silly at how ineffective it was.