“Soft Light”
from the album Couture, Couture, Couture
2004
iTunes
Imagine a band conceived at a Cure concert. Imagine a band with asymmetrical haircuts, skinny ties and even skinnier suits. Imagine a band with a synthesizer-laden sound that draws heavily on English ’80s post-punk and New Wave acts such as Echo and the Bunnymen and Joy Division.
Now imagine such a band fronted by a guy who was not only alive during the heyday of those acts, but was actually a productive citizen!
There certainly is no shortage of bands matching the description above. It seems that since the advent of Interpol, every new act that comes down the pike has to pass an Ian Curtis Proficiency Exam before it can join the rarefied ranks of The Faint, The Killers, Communiquè and Moving Units. And the median ages of the members of these bands puts most of ’em in diapers (or Aqua-Man Underoos, as the case may be) when Mr. Curtis shuffled off this mortal coil.
So what a refreshing spin on the ’80s revival Frausdots brings with its Sub Pop debut, Couture, Couture, Couture. Frausdots is the brainchild of veteran Los Angeles musician Brent Rademaker, and his songwriting partner and muse Michelle Loiselle. With an ever-evolving cast of back-up players from a diverse range of bands (The Cure, Warlocks, Trotsky Icepick, Idaho Falls, The Tyde, Rooney, Brian Jonestown Massacre), Frausdots simply has too much age and experience behind it to blend in with the crowd … no matter how much that crowd resembles Nick Rhodes circa 1982.
Look beyond the Gary Numan-esque CD graphics and the mope-rock song titles (“Fashion Death Trends,” “Dead Wrong”). There is a vitality to these songs that belies the attempt at a cold, lifeless aesthetic, whether it’s Mia Doi Todd’s pretty backing vocals on “Soft Light,” Hunter Crowley’s visceral drumbeat on “Contact,” or the Paisley Underground influence of “Current Bedding.” The spacey psychedelia is strong here; “The Extremists” is the best, brightest indie-pop song the Dandy Warhols never recorded.
It’s as if Rademaker’s years making warm, bouncy California country-rock with Beachwood Sparks and The Tyde have rendered him incapable of solid suicidal ideation. There’s some irrepressible sunshine mixed in with the gloom. And it is the sunshine that keeps Couture from taking itself too seriously and becoming a Bunnymen caricature.
Opening with a sly nod to America’s “A Horse With No Name” on the first track, “Dead Wrong,” Rademaker clearly is not afraid of showing his age. While the lyrical content and tone might get a bit lugubrious at times (“Broken Arrows”), it is the music that eventually gives away the truth — Rademaker and Loiselle are skilled song crafters with a whole lot more than post-adolescent nostalgia going for them.
While a band such as The Killers makes a very impressive and spot-on compendium of “sounds of the 80’s” for the new millennium, what Frausdots succeeds at is simply a great record that, incidentally, could have been made in the ’80s. This is the sound of people who actually came of age with the music they pay homage to, rather than an expert post-mortem rendered years after the fact through religious study of an older sibling’s record collection. It makes a difference. In fact, it’s almost inaccurate to group Frausdots in with the retro-’80s contingent: If you take away press kits and sartorial choices, what you’ve got is simply brilliant indie-pop that transcends the limitations of its cohorts.