Pershing

25 January 2008
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Nearby, please find for yourself an exclusive video production of the making of Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin’s forthcoming sophomore album, Pershing, out on Polyvinyl Records in early April. Filmed by Philip Dickey, you see kids being kids, toddlers given all the credit for the new record’s worth and group spokesperson saying, “We knew what we were doing. We knew EXACTLY what we were doing,” just before you swear you just caught a glimpse of Kurt Cobain. The new record is worth the wait, thanks to that baby.

Thankfully, Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin is exactly how it seems. It is a young band, sprung out of what those on the coasts would call nowhere, that makes music for themselves that other people living in various other nowheres can relate to and enjoy for its lack of trying too hard. The band and its four members are humbly normal, warm to the touch and sound and crisp in their untainted enthusiasm for what they’re doing – creating perfectly tanned songs, ready for anyone to pass by and jealously comment, “Looks like you got some sun” – the jealousy heightened if the commenting is done between the months of December and March where SSLYBY call home in Springfield, Missouri. You see, this band got scooped into the fray two years ago, when its self-released debut album Broom caught the attention of Spin magazine, setting off a bonanza of interest. It got their songs on an episode of a popular show from the WB – one where boys and girls struggle to figure each other out and ultimately get depressed about the whole thing — and it got them around the world a few times, playing these songs that they recorded in an attic in Springfield. They’ll admit to wanting to sound like Elliott Smith back then, because that was to be the easiest way to impress a certain girl, but Boris Yeltsin has always had a firm grasp on what it wanted to do – make records that somehow retain some of those timeless tickles that all of the great songs that they adore have. I’ve heard Philip Dickey speak – many times – breathlessly about bands he can’t shake and the endless parade of music that he feels inside his own cells just waiting to burst like too much aggravated popcorn splitting its head open. He derived considerable glee when the band embarked on its first real tour in 2006, with Catfish Haven, and played some of the dirty, nasty haunts that Kurt Cobain and Nirvana cut their grungy teeth in. He fell head over heels with the romantic idea that in a few nights he was going to play the first place that he was positive Cobain had been before, likely seeing the stinky filth hole of a bathroom and thinking, “He pissed right there.” I’ve watched patiently as John Robert Cardwell listened to Built To Spill’s “You In Reverse” for the first time – a month before it came out – giddy that Doug Martsch doesn’t sing for something like the first four minutes of opener “Goin’ Against Your Mind.” I’ve seen him wear boat shoes and I’ve seen him wear cowboy boots – two absolutely appropriate shoddings for a man from the Ozarks – where rusticity and lake playing go hand-in-hand. I’ve witnessed Will Knauer look like an Allman Brother and Jonathan James (he’s back with the band after a hiatus) is mysterious and quirky. “Broom” was a tray of a la carte menu items, an offering of unquestionable innocence and naïve potpourri. It was impressive and noteworthy, but “Glue Girls” – the first real release on Champaign’s Polyvinyl Records – is not about the same things that the first record was. It is not about the existence of that unquestionable innocence, but the dwindling nature of it. The second worst phrase in the American language to describe something is “it’s a coming of age story,” right behind “a tour de force,” and neither of those would work here either, though there’s so much proceeding and so much new air to this sophomore record that makes you look at the “old” SSLYBY as a foursome barely able to grow a dirty mustache across their upper lips and now the “new” band can pack on a beard. They adventured together. They saw the death of their name sake, the alcoholic Russian leader. They played a one-off show in Moscow, filming the extravaganza as well as taking still frames of it. They saw California for the first time, driving into its silvery sun and enjoying every minute of wearing their flip-flops out. They discovered even more so – even with that blog slobbering and dull roaring out there amongst the buildings and the rest of the tin world – that things aren’t easy and girls still lead to rotten times if you let them. They learned that they were losing something at the same time they were gaining another thing. They found that they appreciated where they were from – the city where Porter Wagoner and Brenda Lee earned their names — even more than they realized they did. It’s a record that makes you feel as if the Beach Boys were making a part deux of “Party!” only not doing it so cheerily (no “Hully Gully”) and playing all their own material. It feels like a band fitting comfortably into what it’s doing and lovingly applying the melancholic bent to their enhanced perspective. They find ways to make a song about an abandoned department store feel like you just drove 45 miles with the windows down. Your hair’s tussled and you feel like you want to go try to steal that big H and those Es for your own.

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