Eastern Conference Champions
Ameritown
Interscope
By Jose Fritz
I crossed the George Washington Bridge on a hot Sunday afternoon trapped in merciless gridlock. I was browsing new music, and this time it was the advance sampler EP to the Eastern Conference Champions’ Ameritown. Traffic was at a typical stand still in utter opposition to every other natural impulse of the city. I actually had the car in park for a while so I heard the four songs on the Home Away EP several times each.
“Navy Man” was the big winner. It’s got that overt poppy intention like a classic single that sticks around for decades. And I mean fucking blatant intention; like a midget in face paint with a Louisville Slugger in one hand screaming racial epithets into a bullhorn in a busy intersection.
But then that very same pop song ever so subversively has the heaviest lyrics on the record. Allow me to quote at length to you heathens.
“I was brought up in a Baptist home and it was tough to pay the rent
They said ask and you’ll receiveth no matter what it is
And I am still waiting on, and I am still waiting on…
The smoking led to drinking, and the drinking led to sex
And the sex led to a miscarriage in the bathroom stall of a Hess
And I am still hoping that, the bloodstains they wash off my hands…
I was asking for redemption but I haven’t heard a word
Lord was just too busy but with a smile and a turn he said
One thing I will not forget, when you dig your grave make a shallow pit”
Let it be known that I am impressed. The idea that a tune as catchy as The Box, and one as jittery as “Navy Man” would grace the same album is peculiar. It’s a goddamn tease! There’s an LP hiding behind this EP. It’s the third EP the ECC has dropped, each of them like the clues deliberately left behind by a serial killer enjoying the thrill of the chase.
You can tell they’ve been trusted with real money in the studio. Laguardia, whom Josh used to play in, had those skilled layers of nuance that reveled themselves to you slowly. Every time you listened to a song you’d notice something new and subtle that made the song great. At home in Philly they mattered, but their big album Welcome to the Middle didn’t break nationally, and it was a damn shame. The disc was sharp, catchy, inventive and above all, promising.
ECC is less subtle than that, maybe bearing a lighter stamp of nuevo-anal studio tinkering. But that’s a new place to go in a way. Some bits do bear that tub-ring of saccharine that only dirty money can produce. But those artifacts are spare and only add to the surprising depth and breadth of the album. Radiohead already abandoned pop structures in favor of songs that literally go nowhere. So in that way blatant deconstructionism has been done, as has blatant pop aphorism -- but nuance has not. Subtlety is always a hard sell to jittery radio programmers whose moods change with the tide, moon and wind direction, but it’s the Holy Grail to a music fan.
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