Self help group
New York alt-rock stalwarts crack the code to timeless melody on eighth album. By Keith Cameron.
NADA SURF’S third album, 2002’s Let Go, remains a benchmark for the New York band. Its effervescent melancholy heralded songwriter Matthew Caws’ graduation from ’90s alt-rock irony into a profound diarist of the human condition, and for all its successors’ merits, none have emulated that record’s sustained sickly-sweet buzz of regret. Now, however, the elements have aligned again. After the astringent production of 2008’s Lucky and 2012’s over-clinical The Stars Are Indifferent To Astronomy, You Know Who You Are exudes the same Zen understatement that nourished Let Go. Perhaps the presence of former Guided By Voices guitarist Doug Gillard as a full-time member has refreshed the internal dynamic between Caws and long-term compadres Daniel Lorca and Ira Elliot, but a shift is evident from the beginning, with tripledecked harmony mini-suite Cold To See Clear.
Amid the meld of winsome fingerpicking and powerchordage – a Caws speciality – it invokes the transcendent wonder of music heard via the airwaves: “The radio took me/The radio made me/What can I do but dream?” There’s an old theory that an album’s pivotal moment is side one track three: snag listeners there and you’ve got them for the duration. Here’s where Caws drops the shattering Friend Hospital (“So much better that we’re not together”), positing Alex Chilton astride Crazy Horse on a root canal burn to the soul. The darkness amid Nada Surf is overlooked, especially as, in the wake of Let Go, they began soundtracking coming-of-age US TV dramas like One Tree Hill and The OC. Much of You Know Who You Are could do likewise, though this isn’t to denigrate the deft economy of a heart-tugger like Believe You’re Mine, which despite its familiar catharsis emits a subliminal tension. Only on the mid-album freewheel of Rushing do Caws’ high-register homilies slide into soap opera. Otherwise, even upful songs are shadowed by unease, like New Bird (“The other one’s not singing any more”) which beneath its ragged euphoria intimates familial conflict, or the horn-reveille Out Of The Dark, an exhortation from a bleak place: “I’ve heard that work can tamp down madness.” Even the closing Victory’s Yours, light relief after the edgy motorik of Gold Sounds, really is exit music: “I wish you peace/Now I’m gone.” Throughout the album’s crisp 10-track sequence, this reconfigured band are clearly once again enjoying the fruits of the unfathomable confluence of life and art. Both Matthew Caws parents’ are professors: listening to his bold, self-aware elegies to imbalanced lives you sense he’s inherited enough of their genetic wiring to understand what makes a good song. But knowledge can only take you so far; application is the real test. And You Know Who You Are passes with distinction.