album of the week - 6.1

The Paper Chase

Someday This Could All Be Yours (Vol 1)

Kill Rock Stars (2009)

why you'll love it:  jagged garage rock with a proper grip on horror

why you'll hate it:  gimmicky, depressing content

Horror is a very hard subject to nail.  To please a mass audience, you either have to get too serious or total camp.  The greatest horror films walk the line between the two, being serious about having fun with the material.  Replicating horror culture is even more challenging in music.  If you take it too far, like metal bands do, you become a joke.  If you go the camp route, you'll never amount to anything more than novelty.  

Brazenly, The Paper Chase walks that line.  Throughout 5 albums, the band has managed to get better and better at their craft of creating seriously fun horror.  I feel one of the biggest mistakes they avoided was taking on a gimmick.  These are regular guys in T-shirts playing that classic Kill Rock Stars style no-wave indie garage rock.  Their content is presented at a more abstract level.  No dressing up for trick-or-treat or terrible puns (I'm looking at you, Alkaline Trio).

I think the other reason why they have succeeded at their style is versatility.  Rather than shoehorn in cheesy horror gimmicks into a typical love song, typical political song, etc... the band settles on a certain unnerving piece of content per album.  Hide The Kitchen Knives (2002) has a Halloween style violence in suburbia angle.  God Bless Your Black Heart (2004) had that southern-baptist god fearing tint.  Now You Are Are One of Us (2006) was all about paranoia.  Each of the albums has a distinct pace to them.

FInally, with Someday This Will All Be Yours, we have an album which is, on the surface, themed around natural disasters.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that actually each song's titled disaster was just a metaphor for whatever the content each song had.  For example, "Your Money or Your Life (The Comet)" plays out as if its narrated by a psycho with no empathy for human life "I'm part of the sun, I married the moon, my brother the comet".  The album in general has a nihilistic theme of inevitable death.  I like the record clip at the end about the bitter reality of most deaths being anti-climatic.  

There is a lot of serious content on here, but its delivery makes it so enjoyable.  It feels as if only a true horror fan can respect a band like this.  I honestly can not find a way to simply explain this.  Either you get it, and can step back to find the sum of its parts brilliant; or you can focus on the individual mentions of macabre topics, and not want anything to do with it.  Personally, this is one of my favorite releases of 2009.