Third album Feels Like the Third Time (1993) gets off to a great start with the rolling, stumbling 'My Old Drunk Friend', a song which announces immediately that Irwin and Bean's own songwriting has taken a leap forward. Indeed, the originals on Feels Like the Third Time fit in much better with the covers this time around and demonstrate that their fixation on the old-time approach was reaping real rewards. The album is essentially more of the same as Dancing Under Water, minimal production and just-turned-up-at-the-studio performances, and the same guitar, fiddle, upright bass and occasional pedal steel, but there's an increased confidence about it, which makes it sound more modern, but also more authentic in its representation of a style from the past. There are some surprising choices of covers too, including a lovely little riff on Nick Lowe's 'You Make Me' and a funny bluegrass mash-up including bits of the Cure's 'Lullaby'. It's a great album and in some ways it's Freakwater's best.
The fifth album, Springtime (1997) is a bit cleaner and has some electric guitar work, which moves it slightly out of the specific revivalist agenda of the previous albums. The songs are slightly more complexly arranged and there's the sense of a restlessness to the record, which I guess is understandable after four albums in pretty which identical style. Springtime is mostly composed of original tunes and the whole album does sound both more modern and less stylised, closer to the country-played-by-indie-kids that had become popular by the time that the band made Springtime. In that sense it fits more closely into a growing genre, but it also detracts from the idea that they were fairly pioneering in the genre themselves. It's a lovely record though is Springtime and although it doesn't have the singular character of the earlier records, it's still a great piece of work.
Although the Association had the big hits it was the Free Design who made some of the most ornate fun-pop music of the 60's. Sixth album, 1972's One By One, is a masterclass in harmony, melodic arrangements that are lighter than air, and understated instrumentation and it really is surprising to think that the band had absolutely no commercial success to speak of. One By One actually is a relatively sedate affair compared to their earlier albums. It's a rather more thoughtful, reflective record by comparison, but it's worth remembering that we're talking about in comparison with some of the most insanely effervescent pop music ever recorded. One By One has its share of bubbly pop, but it also has the calmer 'Friendly Man' and the absolutely gorgeous slower number 'Going Back' which is one of the band's greatest songs. There was trouble brewing and the band would only make one more album until reuniting in the 2000's, and that may explain the rather more pensive air to the album, and the lyrics which are considerably darker than anything on their earlier records. As usual for the Free Design, the instruments that really share the centre stage with the heavenly vocal harmonies are the horn section which is used as a propulsive foundation for the songs. It's all gold and although the more obviously cheery albums are easier to love, One By One is a great pop album.
Superb Spanish label Siesta had long championed the Free Design and in the late 1990's put out a series of compilation albums and singles, including a 7" which they called the Christmas Single #2, containing three old tracks (the excellent 'Christmas is the Day', the title track from the album 'There is a Song' and 'Little Fugue'). All three tunes are great, and the Free Design were a band for whom Christmas was made - their light touch and wonderful harmonies together with their innocent lyrical concerns are perfect for the season.
The first of the three compilation albums Siesta put out in 1998 (all of which compile material from the initial career from 1967-1973 and when combined contain most of the seven original albums) was Umbrellas, but it's worth talking about Umbrellas and Raindrops together bearing in mind they both compile different tracks from the same original albums and therefore are basically two parts of the same thing. The material is not arranged chronologically but it's still pretty easy to chart the development of the band, from the almosy unbelievably naive super-melodic pop of the Kites Are Fun album (which had the astonishingly naive title track and the paean to running about in puddles 'Umbrellas' through to the gloomier, denser sound of final album There Is a Song (with its darker title track and relatively sparse 'The Symbols Ring'). Every album has its particular character, from the child-oriented The Free Design Sing for Very Important People to the cosmic pop of Stars/Time/Bubbles/Love (which actually has some of their best stuff on it), but the essential character of uplifting pop music with the occasional spiritual ballad remains true throughout. Again, both Umbrellas and Raindrops are proof that sometimes you just can't tell what's going to be a success because this stuff must surely have been a shoe-in for chart action at the time, but it just didn't happen.
And speaking of naive, folk-pop outfit Frente traded on creating a sense of innocent fun with their debut album Marvin (1992). Marvin is a funny mix of stuff from straight down the line pop songs ('Accidentally Kelly Street' and 'Ordinary Angels' which sound like girly versions of the more melodic end of the Go-Betweens) to off-kilter jazzy numbers like 'See/Believe'. Angie Hart's high, girl-in-the-playground vocals are a bit of an acquired taste, but if you can get to grips with her phrasing and intonation then her voice reveals itself to be really quite charming and, apart from anything else, it suits these breezy pop tunes perfectly. Things are at their best on the album when they're taken most simply - it's the pop songs that work best by far and the more experimental edges, although an admirable attempt to bitter the sugariness of the whole thing, fall rather flat. The single of 'Accidentally Kelly Street' has a few tunes that show off how much better their jazzier chops work when played acoustically as the versions of 'Oh Brilliance' and 'Testimony' prove.
After a dismaying appearance on Home and Away, the lead single from the second album, 'Horrible' (1996) is a terrible song and didn't bode at all well for the album, although the B-side, an acoustic version of another album track, 'Destroyer', is much better. I never heard the second album and don't particularly feel the need to.
The voice of suburban New Jersey, Dean Friedman, said a lot more about the time and place he was from than contemporaries like Bruce Springsteen. Not for Friedman the overblown tales of youthful desperation and the need to burst out into the night, oh no. Friedman was strictly housebound, his songs being about people quite happily going to the deli to pick up nibbles for the party later at which maybe a bit of covert swining might go on. In many ways Friedman's lounge songwriting and Noo Yoik delivery disguised a really quite bitterly cynical edge, which could often be cuttingly funny. However, as with the rest of his work, his self-titled debut album (1977) is mostly notable for its parodically unsubtle cultural signification, all big hair, massive moustache and none more New Jersey delivery. In some ways it's the kind of thing that could only have happened in 1977, a soundtrack to Cyra McFadden's The Serial and pre-empting the opening titles to Head of the Class. It's a great record mainly because it's such a terrible record and such a supremely evocative record of such a supremely silly time.
Even more successful in evoking that very silliness is second album Well, Well Said the Rocking Chair (1978) which has not only an inexplicable plasticine picture on the cover featuring not one but four versions of Friedman's face, but also an inexplicable Everest scaling falsetto in the opening line of the title track. In fact 'Well, Well Said the Rocking Chair' is a fantastic piece of absurdity throughout. 'I've Had Enough' has some amazingly corny rockin' guitar soloing and the album also has one of Friedman's most extraordinary successes, the duet 'Lucky Stars', the lyrics to which I recommend looking up. In fact don't bother because the youtube link on the album cover below will be to the remarkable 'Lucky Stars', which I demand you watch and enjoy. Dig that sax work while you're at it too. "4 in the morning, I'm in the mood for some corned beef on rye", so opens the unbelievable 'The Deli Song (Corned Beef on Wry)', which basically has Dean singing us through a night in the Big Apple, in which he is joined by various bit parts (waitresses, girlfriend, etc). It's magic stuff, bold, confident and really, really ridiculous. You get the impression that Friedman considered himself a kind of pop music Woody Allen ("I don't know if it's something I ate, or if I'm in love"), giving us all the flavours of an ironic observer in the big city, but the trouble is that while Woody's films of the late 70's still seem like perfect portraits of a time and place Friedman's songs sound like a perfect summation of why Woody's romance was unrealistic, the truth is that it was probably all as crap as Friedman's records. But you see, that's why Well, Well Said the Rocking Chair is so very, very brilliant.
Next up would be the Very Best of Dean Friedman 1977-1982 but considering that its 16 songs are all taken from the two albums we've just done, there's no point in discussing it.
Another nice bit of nu-rave meets shoegaze is found in the supremely well-ordered and confident eponymous debut by Friendly Fires (2008). Interestingly listening to it now it's difficult to tell if its a sound that has dated already or still sounds pretty good. But that's most likely because I still have a lot of time for anything that takes the shoegaze guitar sound and uses it for any purpose and although a lot of the latinate percussion and M83 style-keyboard layering might well sound a bit of a touch sell quite soon, I think it all still works pretty well. The only difficulty with it is that even when it's riffing on Talking Heads (the vocal line of 'In the Hospital' is almost laughably reverential) the whole thing is just too clean, too well-constructed and as a result it's lacking any rough edges to keep you listening out for. As Aswiny just said, once the record's on you're going to enjoy it, but rare indeed is the occasion when you're going to actively think, oh yes, the Friendly Fires, get that on. It's more than a decent album and for all its Talking Heads by Eno by Slowdive wrapped up in nu-rave garb, there's still something vital lacking. Maybe it's a heart. Whatever though, 'Paris' is still one of the great late 2000's dance tunes, if only because it sums up a very specific middle class idea of ambition (and rips off M83 so precisely).
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