splendidezine.com
winter 2002
I've done it before and I'll do it again -- recommending an album as much for the music it makes the listener recall as for the music it contains. As ye old tired Seinfeld catch-phrase says, "Not that there's anything wrong with that." We all have favourite albums and we all have less-than-favourite albums that function mainly to reinforce the strengths of our favourites. Populist Octopus functions in this manner.
Texans Mari and Trey Pool, a happily wedded guitar-slinging couple, comprise two-thirds of Sad Like Crazy. The group, which also features Thane Matcek, appears to be a pretty agreeable bunch -- each member writes his/her own songs before bringing them to the band, at which time decisions are made concerning who is going to play what instrument on which tracks. Everyone gets a vote, no one seems to get vetoed and everyone gets to play drums (which, as we all know, is the holy grail for bored guitar and bass players). All this free-wheeling results in a diverse collection of songs unified only by the personnel involved and the sonic quality of their presentation. That's sonic quality as in "low lo-fi".
Recorded by the group at a home studio, Populist Octopus has that lo-fi sound nailed, perfectly recalling the hazy dissonance of the earliest Pavement -- that is, before they were digitally swabbed. Imagine, ten years after the fact, on the heels of its celebrated re-release, Slanted and Enchanted is greeted not with yet another homage to its DIY mastery but with a contemporary -- it's the Swirlies' Broke Dick Car without the noise and arty insanity. The drums often sound like they've been recorded in a distant room, away from the rest of the group, and the vocals occasionally display the same abstract quality.
Mari's tracks feature a Juliana Hatfield-esque vocal style, typified by the almost lazy ease with which melodic themes are articulated. The instrumentation on Mari's tracks has a Helium-ish vibe, though it's never a hundred percent match. Then there's "Batman The Horse", the album's instrumental centerpiece -- it's a mock-up of Yo La Tengo's wanking experiments combined with Sonic Youth's "Diamond Sea", and it's brilliant.
While I wouldn't go so far as to employ the overused critical phase "wildly uneven", there are several tracks on Populist Octopus that sit somewhat uneasily alongside the rest, particularly those with a cleaner, folkier feel ("Too Much Light" and "Shape of Her Head"). After all, at its heart, Populist Octopus is indie-rock as it should be: homemade, off-the-cuff, energized and sophisticated in a manner that transcends its technical limitations.
Sadly, it appears this will likely be Sad Like Crazy's swan song. The group has already performed their "last show" in Houston, Texas and publicly announced they have no plans to record together in the future. It seems Mari is expecting her first child, and writing and recording new music will not be a priority -- and for a band that rarely performed live, there really isn't much else to do. Lucky for us, then, that their final effort is such a success, and a fitting articulation of a sound that never grows stale.
ink19.com
winter 2002
Stein Haukland
Imagine a folksy crossbreed of Guided
By Voices and Pavement, and you may think of something along the lines
of Sad Like Crazy. On Populist Octopus ,
this Texan threesome offer up a stew of archetypal indie rock played with
power-pop's loose and charming approach. It's all pretty sloppy, in the best
possible way,
and they do the occasional hoedown indie folk, such as on the very fine "Too
Much Light." So you know what to expect, then, only you'd never guess
how good it'd be.
From the shuffling "Mess With Your Head" to the piss-taking rock
n' roll that is "Up the Academy's Ass," Sad Like Crazy demonstrates
a versatility and playfulness that's entirely unique and highly entertaining.
Going from the tormented to the devil-may-care at the drop of a dime, Sad
Like Crazy are never dull, always on the move. Worth checking out for any
fan of
college indie.
Houston Press
Fall 2002
We usually drink a lot." So says Sad Like Crazy's Trey Pool of the band's gig preparations. "For the jitters thing, thinking it would make us play better. It doesn't." For Pool and his bandmates, playing live can be stressful, especially since they write and record songs so quickly and in such a piecemeal fashion that they frequently don't have a chance to really learn how to play them. "We're hardly ever good live," he goes on. "It surprises us when we play a good live show." Pool, along with wife Mari and longtime friend Thane Matcek, make up Sad Like Crazy, a band that was built on loose collaboration. It's a sort of recording collective: Each member writes his or her own material and contributes where appropriate to the others' songs. They don't even have set instruments -- one might play drums on one song and guitar on the next, a constant rotation that further complicates playing the songs live as a traditional band. "It's like math, figuring out a set," says Mari. They have to arrange things just so or everything will fall apart, and fall apart they do, with more regularity than they would like. "We're a pretty vulnerable little band," says Trey. "It's not a band where we can knock your socks off live all the time. We seem to feed off of bad vibes and suck accordingly." That's not to say that they suck all the time, but that they're their own worst critics. "Actually we usually disagree with people when they come up and say we played a good show," says Mari. Don't listen to her. The shows aren't as bad as they make them out to be. In fact, at KTRU's annual outdoor show in April, Sad Like Crazy was downright tight. The band is the product of the long-defunct Club Safe Parking, which was less a club than it was the downtown home (and later, studio) of Gram Lebron and sometimes Trey Pool. Lebron and Pool would often invite friends over for musical experimentation. Eventually Lebron acquired some recording equipment, and he started documenting the near-constant living room performances. This was the genesis of several bands, including All Transistor, Matcek's other project. It was also where Trey met Mari. "Mari just happened to be at a party over there, where we ended up playing, and I invited her to come over and play," says Trey. Soon she was recording with Gram and Trey. To fill out their sound, the trio auditioned bass players, but it was their friend Matcek who was most interested. "He was the only person who bothered to learn the songs," says Trey. The band eventually grew to include Piam Oskoui as the regular drummer. By this time, they were recording in other locations, but never a proper studio, where cost discourages experimentation. To Sad Like Crazy, experimentation is key. Love Songs to Death, the 2001 CD that resulted from three years of these sessions, is a sprawling mess. Its 22 songs clock in at over 72 minutes -- just shy of the maximum a CD can handle. Beyond the number of songs, there is no clear style and sometimes not much structure. But that's not really the point. This is a band that enjoys playing music, and their albums are a celebration of that. It's not supposed to impress you. "There are way too many songs," admits Trey, who doesn't care much if you agree with that assessment or not. "We make this music for ourselves, and if somebody else likes it, that's good." But every musician makes music for himself, right? Sad Like Crazy's members are really making music for each other. In the time since that first CD came out, Trey and Mari got married and bought a house, and Matcek moved into the garage apartment behind it. Of course, they installed recording equipment in the spare bedroom. They're like a family that happens to produces CDs -- the musical equivalent of drawings and photos stuck to a refrigerator. Listening to these CDs is like being invited in to share in the family fun. It's been a little over a year since that first album, and Sad Like Crazy is already back with a follow-up. The three (Lebron has since left Houston for San Francisco) spent most of their free time recording songs in the bedroom. "We probably recorded 50 over the course of the year," says Trey. From that, they picked 16 to make Populist Octopus, another stylistic hodgepodge. Fewer people, fewer songs and a centralized recording venue have made Octopus a more cohesive album than Love Songs, but it's still beautifully unfocused. Some of its songs are also much more personal, with less of the worked-over sound of an entire band. Mari's brilliant album-ender, "Millionaires," is obviously the work of one person. But other songs are still band-oriented. "Up the Academy's Ass" starts off as if we were overhearing a discussion about music: "I like it when they just rock out," someone says. "Duh nuh nuh, duh nuh nuh." And then the band kicks in with the actual cheesy Scorpions-style rock-out riff. Duh nuh nuh, duh nuh nuh. It's the band's way of winking, their way of saying, "Hey, we know this is a dumb rock song," and asking you to enjoy it with them. Matcek and the Pools are saying Octopus's CD release party at Rudyard's will be Sad Like Crazy's last show. Mari is expecting, and she and Trey know that a baby will mean less time for recording and definitely less chance of rehearsal. But that's later. For now, the bandmates are entertaining themselves by finally learning the new album's songs for the show. Despite their being more familiar with the material, things still might fall apart on stage and they might cut the set short. Or then again it could be their best show yet. Whatever happens, they won't be too discouraged. "We're always going to play music -- if not together, we'll always play music," Matcek says. "Yeah," continues Trey, "time is made to be wasted." -JUSTIN CRANE