Four Hundred And Eighty-Seven Thousand Times

I’m looking for someone that I can play with
I don’t care if she’s skinny, I don’t care if she’s fat
As long as she goes for boys like me
‘Cause I like them like that

Love eh? what’s it all about? now I’m aware that over the years this question has vexed the best poets, philosophers and scientists as countless of them have had a go at pondering the imponderable.  Some would have you believe that love is the most precious, most humane feeling of all, a transcendent state of being that defines and differentiates our species as human.  Others would have you know that all love is sent from heaven, a gift from the deity and that we move closer to him/her when we exhibit it.  Still others would have you believe that it is solely a biological process, fully explicable with reference to physiological processes and minute chemical imbalances within the body.  Moe Berg has his own theory.

She might be a Catholic
She might be a nurse
She might give me a child
Or gonorrhoea, or something worse

Moe, lead singer and lyricist with 1537 faves, The Pursuit of Happiness knows that love is the root of all, if not evil, then all awkwardness, social compulsion and regret, as well as the source of all manner of jiggy-piggy pleasures which you can feel awkward, obsess about and regret later*.  Love Junk, the band’s debut, illustrates this perfectly and I think, at its best, an absolutely brilliant LP.

She might be a painter
Or a communist with my luck
But that that’s the kind of girls
You really want to fuck
Yeah, so I’m looking for girls

The TPOH sound is right there from the off on ‘Hard to Laugh’, if forced at moose-point to describe it I’d plump for something usefully vague like ‘garage band power pop’, the chugging riffs are leavened by jangly guitars and Leslie Stanwyck and Kris Abbot’s vocals; I’ve always loved the female vocals on their stuff.  Their sound developed, acquired more light and shade, as I assume they got better at their game, but I really dig the urgency they infuse every track on Love Junk with.  ‘Hard to Laugh’ is a brilliant tale of a boyfriend’s angst that his beautiful girlfriend has been cheating on him, ‘People always asks you why you’re so serious / ‘Cause your woman’s got a body that would make most men delirious’; personally I think its all in his head and she’s faithful to him, or at least until his jealousy inevitably drives her into the arms of another.  ‘Ten Fingers’ is another perfectly realised take on obsession, the sheer repetition of ‘Is that the way it feels for you?’ drives this home perfectly.  Lots of love here, just not much light.

It was the smart-arse lyrics of ‘I’m An Adult Now’ which first really hooked me on Love Junk.  Wrapped up in their rockingest tune, Berg’s lyrics essentially deal with how crap it is being adult and semi-sensible at least, nailing it perfectly in relation to girls and sex.  There’s some tasty bass playing from Johnny Sinclair prominent on this tune too**.  It was and is an incredibly cool thing to write a song about, still more so to carry it off so well.  Pausing briefly to patronise a younger girl, albeit both ironically and enviously, on ‘She’s So Young’, we hit one of my favourite song titles head-on; ‘Consciousness Raising as a Social Tool’.  We’re really not in the Crüe-zone here folks, a song about political/spiritual activity as a means to a social end? again the fact it is a good tune, saves it from just being smart-ass.

I want to kiss her lips
I want to see her dance
I want to see her wriggle and jiggle
Right out of her pants***
Yeah, so I’m looking for girls

My absolute favourite track on Love Junk is ‘Walking on the Woods’, over some clever, restrained drum and strum, Moe recounts the tale of seeing a pretty girl reading a book on the subway train one morning, catching her eye sharing a smile (she smiled when she caught me so I diverted my look / when I lifted my head she was back inside her book) and regrets the fact you can’t just go and say hello like that, how we live like ‘we’re walking in the woods’.  Two weeks later he sees a newspaper article about her, here he rhymes ‘grief-stricken mom and dad’ with ‘beaten pretty bad’ and feels really bad for her, sometimes when you walk in the woods, ‘the wolves are gonna eat you’ and when you see a pair of eyes you don’t know if you’re seeing a friend.  I love this track, for the music, for the subject matter and for the execution, its just there and right for me^.

I’m looking for someone
With a voice that’s true
And I’m going to be nice to her
May she’ll be nice too

Then I’m going to do it
Gonna do it to her
Four hundred and eighty-seven thousand times
Yeah, so looking for girls

As it is traditional for me to say it at this point when I glance at my word count (I’m terrified of boring you), I won’t give you the whole track-by-track here.  Needless to say though, I love the girlfriend’s-discarded-clothes-as-mental-travelogue on the ‘Beautiful White’, clearly recorded in Hornovision and the jingly-jangly college rock feel of ‘When The Sky Comes Falling Down’.  And is as equally traditional, Love Junk does tail off slightly towards the end of the second side, but it’s none of it poor, maybe just a victim of such high earlier standards.

Okay so I’ll come clean, I’m an unrepentant fan of The Pursuit of Happiness, I mean come on – any band whose fan club was called ‘The Love Slaves of TPOH’ nudges towards the upper echelons of my affections.  They made some excellent music, made me chuckle, made me nod my head and just wince as Moe sang truths that most of us wouldn’t whisper.  Most of all though I appreciated the way Moe knew love.

Looking for girls
Looking for girls
Looking for girls
Looking for girls

410 Down.

P.S – interspersed lyrics courtesy of ‘Looking For Girls’.

*and occasionally, very occasionally, breaks out into full-on hopeful romance such as the moving ‘All I Want’ on One-Sided Story.

**saw this for the first time ever today.

I can’t even look at young girls anymore
People will think I’m some kind of pervert
Adult sex is either boring or dirty
Young people they can get away with murder

I don’t write songs about girls anymore
I have to write songs about women
No more boy meets girl boy loses girl
More like man tries to understand what the hell went wrong

***the dance/pants rhyme scheme is officially endorsed on the 1537 blog.

^and a step on from Starz ‘Subway Terror’, the only other track I can think of along similar lines.