{"id":255,"date":"2011-08-31T20:23:34","date_gmt":"2011-08-31T20:23:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicurbanism\/?p=255"},"modified":"2012-11-10T04:29:57","modified_gmt":"2012-11-10T04:29:57","slug":"whats-local-a-review-of-the-dears-lost-in-the-plot-by-lorraine-carpenter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/2011\/08\/31\/whats-local-a-review-of-the-dears-lost-in-the-plot-by-lorraine-carpenter\/","title":{"rendered":"what’s local? a review of “The Dears: Lost in the Plot” by Lorraine Carpenter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Does it diminish a musician’s accomplishments to view them through his or her place of origin?\u00a0 Does the prism of the “hometown” assign the stigma of parochialism or, worse, artistic failure, implying that the musician never got out of the minor leagues, or never wanted to?<\/p>\n

Consider how we don’t find it fundamentally necessary to know where the “truly great” artists come from.\u00a0 We don’t understand, say, David Bowie or\u00a0Keith Richards<\/a> primarily their local origins.\u00a0 Yes, they were children of the suburbs and provinces, perhaps, but these places’ identities (Bromley, Dartford) and qualities are fairly incidental and transcended by the non-local inspirations and global impacts of the music they made at their prime.\u00a0 If we’re interested in the geography of their work, it’s usually to mark the place of inspiration in a peripatetic career: Bowie’s Berlin albums, the Stones’ recordings in Richards’ tax exile home on the coast of France.<\/p>\n

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Beyond a historian’s documentary interest, what’s there to be learned from contextualizing a band within the place where it formed and rose to prominence?\u00a0\u00a0 This is the question begged and not adequately answered by Lorraine Carpenter’s The Dears: Lost in the Plot<\/em>\u00a0(Invisible, 2011).\u00a0 91 pages in length, the book is basically an extended feature article on the Dears, the vastly underrated and unfairly overlooked legends of Montreal indie-rock.\u00a0 Through interviews with members past and present, Carpenter provides a convincing narrative about the band’s musical triumphs and career frustrations.\u00a0 But she further proposes that the Dears’ story is also a story about musical Montreal:<\/p>\n

The Dears are as good a band as any Canadian act of the aughts.\u00a0 But why didn’t they get the glory?\u00a0 Being “ahead of the curve,” as Lightburn said, or simply victims of bad timing.\u00a0 The hype behind the band, particularly in North American, peaked just prior to the rise of social media and blogs, before online trumpeting could propel a band as far as it can today.\u00a0 Perhaps that why, when the Montreal scene was being feted in a succession of major publications, their name was usually absent\u2014the only organization to shine the spotlight on The Dears in a Montreal-scene piece was CBC’s\u00a0The National<\/em>, Canada’s nightly news show (pg. 8).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So the stakes have been raised: how can the Dears\u2014their biographies, aspirations, and music\u2014be understood in the context of Montreal?\u00a0 Unfortunately,\u00a0The Dears: Lost in the Plot<\/em>\u00a0doesn’t really develop many insights about the group’s relationship to their city of origin.\u00a0 However, it does offers some provocative material for such a project \u2014or, rather, it sketches out what this material might look like\u2014almost despite Carpenter’s best intentions.<\/p>\n

By highlighting such shortcomings, let me make clear at the onset that I’m not here to fault Lorraine Carpenter for failing to write a different book.\u00a0 That’s a cheap form of criticism, and it dismisses what the author brings to the table (and what Invisible Publishing is trying to do with the slim volumes it releases).\u00a0 Furthermore, I’ll happily gobble up any lengthy treatise on the Dears, and\u00a0Lost in the Plot<\/em>\u00a0works well as a documentation of the group’s career and a critical review of their work.\u00a0 A Montreal journalist, Carpenter has known the band personally for a long time, she’s very familiar with their recordings (including the very early ones that are maybe best overlooked), and she’s not afraid to call it like she sees it in their typically brilliant yet inconsistent body of recordings.\u00a0 (I for one appreciate her advice to skip the first four tracks on\u00a0Gang of Losers<\/em>; a false start, these songs betray the Dears’ Britpop influences a little too earnestly in their anthemic, swing-for-the-bleachers stylings, postponing the band’s more interesting aesthetic development until track #5.)<\/p>\n

More to the point, the Dears needn’t be listened to or understood as a “Montreal group” first and foremost.\u00a0 Really, in my book they’re not even a “Canadian group,” just a\u00a0great band<\/em>.\u00a0 But by pushing at the urban\/local angle that Carpenter uses to document the Dears, I want to use this review to think about some questions of inquiry and methods for analyzing musical urbanism.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

An appreciation<\/strong><\/p>\n

To begin, hands up for folks who’ve given the Dears a few listens…\u00a0 Not that many?\u00a0 Okay, that’s simply unacceptable.<\/p>\n

The Dears’ sound\u2014dramatic, tuneful, majestic, witty, able to shoulder the burden of the listener’s own heartbreak and anguish\u2014is probably best conveyed by the title of their 2001 EP,\u00a0Orchestral Pop Noir Romantique<\/em>.\u00a0 Unlike some other ’00s groups around whom that category could loosely fit (Stereolab, Air), the Dears continued to evolve in musical scope and theme.\u00a0 Perhaps that evolution hasn’t been quite as flashy as Pitchfork (whose coolness toward the Dears is notorious) and other music bloggers might like, but it has been uncontrived and hard earned.\u00a0 In over fifteen years of operation, the Dears have produced five albums, two EPs and other recorded odds and ends characterized by remarkable musical and emotional substance. I find myself returning to these records again and again; each album is rewarding on its own and further comprises an fascinating career arc comparable to their influences\u2014the Smiths\/Morrissey, Suede, Pulp, and (I never see anyone mention this) Roxy Music\/Bryan Ferry.\u00a0 After today’s trends have faded into obsolescence five, fifteen, fifty years from now, I suspect the Dears’ music will still sound great.<\/p>\n