Some of the tunes from this "underground Western" band sound like power pop without urgency. "Stuck On You" combines odd rhythmic shifts and a propulsive beat with cliched, puerile lyrics: "maybe maybe we can make it make it make it baby I'm stuck on you". This kind of vacuous exuberance contrasts with the righteous emoting found on Raspberries records such as I Wanna Be With You: "Hold me tight / My love could live forever after tonight / If you believe that what we're doing is right." Also, Giant's surrealistic lyrics -- "It's so easy to be wrong / It's so easy to be right" only serve to underscore the Pistol Arrows lyrics' merely fantastical purview.
Another area of concern is the New Wave influence on Look! The nervy, kyoto synth on the verse of "All Horses" simply does not mesh with the soulful violin on the same track's chorus. The Cars, on "My Best Friend's Girl", succeeded in blending a rootsy guitar part with a modern keyboard sound. Unfortunately, the Pistol Arrows have not yet found a proper context for their stylistic juxtapositions. Maybe they should ballast the New Wave kitsch and keep the instrumentation more straitforward next go around. After all, the album is called Look! -- not Look Sharp!
Having said this, I find many of the individual tracks to be very good, even great. "Spy Versus Spy," with proper exposure, could be a smash hit. Listen to "Starry Eyes" by the Records back-to-back with "Spy Versus Spy." How can Sarmiento reconfigure the same melancholy suspended chords as the Records' track, as well as utilizing the same international intrigue or spying metaphor without being redundant? He does it through a melody as pure as Siberian snow and a lyric that plumbs the depths of an unlikely subject: Small-time band business gone bad. Sarmiento isn't ruminating over some bigtime, bloated Al Grossman type, but rather a cute little gofer or secretary that liked to get a bit too close. Another standout, "Practically Yours", sports an ethereal groove that falls somewhere between Modern English's "I Melt With You" and Smashing Pumpkins' "1979."
One of the these days, music-writing snobs will learn to discriminate between pop and poop. Pop is not fluff; pop is the bildungsroman of the radio age. As such, it explores values that are comprehensible both to young people who are finding their way in the adult world, as well as to adults who wish to keep in touch with the sources of their convictions. On the Pistol Arrows' Look! I find much that disappoints, but evergreens such as "Spy Versus Spy" and "Practically Yours" make Sarmiento and company's latest offering more than worth the price of admission.
Green Man Review has also reviewed the Pistol Arrows' titular alt-Western album. Read that review here. The Pistol Arrows' web site is here.
