The Loud Family, Days For Days

This is another album from that brilliant spring of my junior year in college. I was walking to class one day and running late�it was either Shakespeare at 11:10 or the English Novel at 9:50 or the Revenge Tragedy at 12:30�when I passed a classmate on the sidewalk, going the other direction. Her name was Erin�and I probably harbored a secret crush on her, but that's a horse of a whole different barrel of rocks�and she told me class was cancelled because not enough people had shown up. "But I'm on my way; I'm just late!" I said, trying for all the world to sound disappointed that I wouldn't get to spend the next two hours discussing Arden Of Faversham. "Doesn't matter," she said, trying to conceal her own glee. "We don't have quorum." I took this as a sign to go on another CD-shopping expedition with the meager earnings I accrued from my job at the school's fundraising phonathon.

I don't know if that's the day I bought Days For Days; perhaps I'm conflating the germane events in my personal history. The important thing is that it was on such a day, my schedule serendipitously wide-open, that I drove up to the Exclusive Company and picked up the new Loud Family; if not on release day, then soon after. It was late April. On the way home I slipped it into the DiscMan I had plugged into the cassette deck. It didn't immediately blow me away, so I took it out and replaced it with Plants & Birds & Rocks & Things, the Louds' first album, with which I'd become enamored earlier that year. This was not uncommon when buying a hotly-anticipated new release by an artist: I'm underwhelmed when the record inevitably fails to kick me in the balls right away, so I resort to an earlier, more cherished release. This has happened with some of my favorite albums, this being one of them, Tortoise's TNT being another. ("What is this jazz shit? Let's listen to Millions Now Living.") Like most people, it takes a while for me to absorb new music, even when it's by an old favorite like the Loud Family. So I try to reserve my judgement until I've given it at least half a dozen listens, and it's a good thing I adhered to this regimen with DFD, since it's not the most immediately accessible album in the world. A casual listener might be alienated, as I first was, by the way that the �proper� songs alternate with untitled sound collages and melodic scraps that rarely last longer than a minute. And the song titles might lead one unfamiliar with Scott Miller's hyper-intellectual songcraft to conclude that the songs are impenetrable edifices of erudite wankery: "Good, There Are No Lions In The Street" and "Why We Don't Live In Mauritania" are not even going to fit in the columns of the CMJ charts. Doesn't matter. Once you get past�or learn to embrace�the oblique literary, philosophical, and pop-culture references and polysyllabic vocab-builders crammed into the lyrics, you realize these are accessible, pleasant, and elegantly simple pop songs here.

The aforementioned "Good, There Are No Lions In The Street" explores the mechanics of trust and clique mentality with lines like We sensed a change, but the change came strange / all things get painted the right colors when we meet and the breakdown in the middle section of the song offers something approaching a humanistic credo: To be a cowboy, learn how not to be an astronaut / to be a doctor, learn how not to be the president / to be the center of the universe, don't orbit things. Scott Miller's vocal sparring partner, Alison Faith-Levy, provides synth strings and piano flourishes to give this song and the others a sonic pallette that is both quaint and slightly dystopian. "Businessmen Are Okay" is an immediately catchy, bouncy, not-quite-ironic admission that maybe not all members of the corporate elite are there because they have an unquenchable craving for the pillaging of the underpriveledged and the exploitation of the common good. "Way Too Helpful" showcases Miller's vulnerable falsetto in a plaintive ballad, and Days For Days might rank as the Loud Family's most emotionally honest album aside from its predecessor, the "divorce album" Interbabe Concern. The epic "Sister Sleep" concludes the album with three distinct sections that each address, in different ways, the lingering rueful complaint of How Things Could Have Been Done Differently And Probably Better when it comes to both families and lovers. Girl, being close hurts / so I've called from the outskirts / with road noise from a phone booth / so we won't hear the whole truth shows what Miller can accomplish lyrically when he comes down from his ivory tower and engages the ugliness of personal weakness. The next section is a baroque waltz with chiming piano and acoustic guitar laid beneath an elegiac reflection on family dynamics: Last few holidays, I was only thinking / how to get away, numb the chat with drinking / still thinking like a son, saying something clever / they're here to push against, they won't be forever. The song, and the album, finally close with another section that is uptempo but not upbeat: a final push to the sun that falls short, a celebration of best intentions, thrown off course: There's no way to a quasar, they're flung out from us too far / just by chance, maybe not more / we could touch what we live for, concluding with a pianissimo resolution between piano, bass and drums. This song, if not this entire album, carried me through the halcion days of spring 1998 and into the summer, right up until the end of August, when the equinoctial music of autumn would soon take over.

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