Album Reviews

This album was issued back in 2008 but gets reviewed here because though the name Nada Surf has popped through my consciousness for years, I’d never heard them. I know, I can go online and listen and probably even steal all of their stuff for free but I’m not wired like that, so I actually went out and bought this album on vinyl without hearing a note.

That’s how it used to be done and there’s something fun and exciting about that. Even disappointment and disgust can have its value. I remember buying an album by a band called Touch back in the ‘60s just because.

The cover art was creepy, though it was a unique center fold-open design, and I had a feeling I’d hate it. I was right! When I peeled back the shrink-wrap and opened the center gatefold, there were (as I remember it), members of the band shirtless, arms around each other’s shoulders, sort of flying through the air. It was beyond icky. But that I remember the experience all these years later gives it some kind of perverse meaning and life-value. Don’t ask me what that might be, however, because I couldn’t tell you.

What’s more, over time the band Touch has had its reputation burnished. At the time of its release I couldn’t have known that the band’s debut album recording was attended by “rock luminaries” like Mick Jagger and Grace Slick and that the group would get credited by some for inventing “progressive rock” and influencing bands that I do like including Yes and Gabriel era Genesis.

Fortunately, Nada Surf’s Lucky is a much better album than the one from Touch, though the hard luck band, formed in the mid-‘90s and foundering through tales of woe and bad record label experiences (though they had a minor hit with a tune called “Popular” back in 1996) sounds somewhat dated on this pleasingly tuneful, earnest album of mid-tempo rockers.

It may very well be that Nada Surf invented or contributed to this distinctive sound and bands like Death Cab For Cutie and some others copped it, but if you’re familiar with Death Cab, you’ll recognize some of the chording, the melodic constructs and even some of the sentiments expressed, particularly on the opening tune on which Ben Gibbard sings back-up, but in my musical world there’s always room for a good tune driven by guitars’n’drums and this album is filled with them.

Though there’s not a weak or less than thoughtful track on an album filled with great harmonies, memorable melodies and positive thoughts, the production is so weak it sounds as if the entire band plays into a giant megaphone. I suspect this is purposeful.

The album was recorded at Seattle’s Robert Lang studios where Death Cab recorded Narrow Stairs and where Foo Fighters and Nirvana and Alice in Chains and so many others have recorded—and they are fully analog equipped— but jeez, these tunes would be so much more enjoyable with production by Glyn Johns or someone like that, assuming a budget for such a production could be assembled today, which it probably can’t.

It’s not that the producer and engineer didn’t aim for and achieve a reasonable amount of clarity, because they did, it’s just that it’s all squooshed, compressed, frequency and dynamic limited and obscured by haze. Yet, blah as it is, it’s actually better than a lot of what I’ve been hearing lately. I guess there’s no accounting for taste

Is the drum sound here what we’ve come to? Are the vocals? Yes, I’m afraid so. It’s partly fashion, partly budgetary, party technologically (or lack thereof) driven. But in the end, no matter. Speaking of the end, if the final tune “The Film Did Not Go ‘Round” doesn’t move you, you may need a mental laxative.

The album is called “Lucky,” and on the inner sleeve are reproduced “lucky” quotes from I have no idea whom, some in foreign languages. One of the quotes reads “I’d just like to say that at 60 years old, I still do what I love and get to make a living out of it.”

I can relate!

Apparently the band is producing a new album of covers called If I Had a Hi-Fi. Perhaps that explains why this album sounds as it does but here’s hoping they all get really nice hi-fi’s, that actually owning a hi-fi and listening to music as it was intended to be heard, which is big, loud, focused and clean, once again becomes hip and that Nada Surf’s cover album sounds as good as it surely would if the band monitored it on a really good hi-fi!

Meanwhile I’m glad I took a chance on Lucky because it puts me in a good mood every time I listen.