Shudder To Think, Pony Express Record

Is it an exaggeration to say that this album is perfect? Maybe. But then, who�s going to disagree with me? Given the shortcomings Shudder To Think may have had in the decade since this album was released, whether it�s the lackluster 50000 BC, or Craig Wedren�s frustratingly slow trickle of collaborations and solo projects, or Nathan Larson�s disappointing ventures (though heterosexual men everywhere will probably give him credit for dating Cardigans frontwoman Nina Persson). Or should we blame it on the general ebbing of the tidal wave that was once the DC scene? (Who could�ve predicted Fugazi would be the last one standing?)

Shudder To Think may as well have hung it up as soon as Pony Express was in the can, because I don�t see how it could possibly get better than this. What have we got? Well, there�s a little of everything: seemingly every time signature known to modern music, electrically-charged lyrics made up of deconstructed phrases and delivered in Wedren�s beautiful croon, schizophrenic guitar solos like the one in the middle of �Kissi Penni�, gorgeous sing-along rideouts like the ones at the end of �X-French T-shirt� or �Earthquakes Come Home�, whole verses in complete gibberish (Wedren himself has admitted that he doesn�t know what the lyrics to �Chakka� are), brazen pilferings of oldies standards (�Own Me�), a memorable, fiendishly catchy chorus in almost every goddamned song (most notably the anthemic dirge that finally arises from the lurking middle section of "Trackstar"), and no shortage of imagery that is both clever and disturbing (�my mouth is a cold-sore display case�, �a doodle of some ancient mother fucking her son�, �who�s in distress? some damsel with a cancelled subscription to an ambulance�, etc). On this album Shudder To Think at once sound like every other band in DC and like no other band in the world; they saw what everyone else was doing, took the parts they liked, and then tore it all to shreds, and somehow Pony Express Record is what emerged from the wreckage.

It�s fitting, then, that I got this album when I did: I�d heard snippets of it from friends in the years following its release, but didn�t buy my own copy until my sophomore year of college, in the midst of a very long winter (buried deep in snow / dear earthquakes come home) during which I took the best class of my academic career, an unlikely contender called Contemporary Critical Theory. It was my first exposure to post-structrualism, to the whole lot: Derrida, Foucault, Saussure, all of them. These folks and their ilk usually annoy the crap out of most reasonable people, and in less capable hands they would�ve had the same effect on me, but I had the kindest, most down-to-earth professor a kid could ask for explaining it all to me in ways that made sense, and it all became exciting and alive, and I promptly stopped doing any homework for my other two classes and spent entire nights at the library reading about the Pharmakon in �Plato�s Pharmacy� or Foucault�s sexual theory or Bakhtin�s heteroglossia. It was probably the most honestly immersed I�ve ever been in an academic subject, and the soundtrack for the whole thing was Pony Express Record, a musical document on which Shudder To Think did to rock music what Derrida did to Plato: rip the whole goddamned thing apart and build new, terrifying manifestos on the palimpsest. And it worked, I swear! I finished the last disjointed sentences of �Plato�s Pharmacy� and I got it, I really did! Then I left the library and walked out into an arctic campus at midnight, humming along with the queerly celebratory refrain: Heaven is holding out for high scores / out where tears pour down.

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