Jerry Curry writes:
>Bill, No more...."Can I get a witness?" requests for you. I couldn't
>disagree with a statement further than the one I snipped below. I
>find the textured beauty of _Dear 23_ to be so wonderful, that it easily
>creeps onto a Desert Island short short list. As for _Frosting....._, I
>find the sonic dissonance (along, with the heinous masturbation
>reference of the title) to be damn near a betrayal of everything I
>thought the band was about.
Gee, Jer, don't hold back your feelings....
As a longtime Posies fan, my thoughts on the matter:
I remember having heard a few tracks from their first album,
"Failure," when it first came out and thought it was pleasant enough but
wasn't doing cartwheels over it. However, when "Dear 23" came out my
head fell off. To this day I regard it as one of the five greatest power
pop albums of all time; so lush it sounds like it was recorded on black
velvet and chock full of witty lyrics filled with double and triple
entendres. I saw that lineup open up for Marshall Crenshaw a few months
after the album came out and was really surprised by how much harder they
rocked as a live outfit than one would have expected from listening to
the record. The difference was really striking. Later on I found out
that the group had hired John Leckie as producer of "Dear 23" because he
had worked with XTC, which is one of their all-time fave bands, but they
were a little miffed that the sound turned out so lush. They were as
surprised as anyone that it sounded the way it did. There are supposedly
pre-production demos of the "Dear 23" songs that are closer to what the
group sounded like live, though I've never heard any of that stuff.
"Frosting On the Beater" disappointed me on quite a few levels when
it first came out. It was really far more representative of what they
really sounded like than was "Dear 23," but it was missing all but one of
the songs that they had recorded for the unreleased *original* "Dear 23"
followup, "Eclipse." The failure to include one song, in particular,
"This One's Taken," struck me as particularly annoying. To this day I
think a lot of those songs were better than what eventually ended up on
"Frosting...." In short, it wasn't the album that I was expecting,
though I've warmed up to it since then.
Having said that, "Dream All Day" was a minor radio hit for the
group and probably more than half of the group's hardcore fans first
heard the group as they sounded on that album. "Frosting..." might have
seemed like a betrayal, but trust me: the group never really sounded
like that outside of the studio to begin with. Posies fans tend to be
divided into the camp that first heard the group around the time of the
first two albums and those who first heard the group after that period.
"Dear 23" fans rarely revise their opinion of that album and
"Frosting..." fans are similarly loyal.
Tenuous twang connection: the Posies' Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow
can be heard doing a solid Jordanaires imitation on Maria McKee's
terrific "Only Once" from her second album.
--Jon Johnson
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Wollaston, Massachusetts
