The song I’m currently in love with here is ‘Falling Into Something’ a whistling choir of feedback squeals and Inez shrugs “I know that I should care, I couldn’t care less” as the band launch into something loose and comfortable. It’s like The Ramones adjusting to the heat, slowing to a desert pace. The song starts with its guard up and works its way suspiciously into a new feeling, finally reaching a joyous chorus of hope. This is absolutely glorious homemade pop music. Open hearted, refreshingly unburdened by overthinking itself.
The Exbats have a knack for this sort of thing, so it’s always good to have new music from them. Their sixth full length, My Dinner With Crumar, delivers the usual sweet and sassy lift to the spirits, shaking up their sound but not too much. Incredibly, it’s ten years since daddy/daughter duo Kenny & Inez McLain’s first album, during which time the band has expanded and contracted as life allows. It’s currently grown to a six piece, you can see all their little pictures there on the cover, somewhat overshadowed by Crumar, the star of the title.
The Crumar Orchestrator is a 70’s synth with a bunch of instrument sounds, notably strings. In the bandcamp notes for the album Kenny relates how they fell in love with it at the studio. There’s other old keyboards used on these songs too, but they liked the Crumar enough to get one of their own and name the record after it. Despite this infatuation, it’s not a record where they junk their old sound and chase something shiny and new. The keyboards don’t hog the limelight so much as fit perfectly into the band’s world. Their delight at this discovery an image of their thrift shop style approach to musical magic.
The synths most assert themselves on probably the record’s boldest new move, ‘I Only See You When I’m Dancing’ which brings the garage disco clank to fine effect. More Blondie than Ramones and a more impressively dramatic vocal than usual from Inez. There’s also the splendid ‘Call Me An Idiot One More Time’ a blank-eyed groove of synth propulsion and simmering bad attitude. They follow that with the raucous ‘Godder Than God’, short, snappy, and pleasingly deranged it’s the kind of wild half-song more self conscious bands would leave out but I’m glad it’s here.
Elsewhere their bubblegum instincts shine on the suitably daft ‘Laffy Taffy’ a love song to candy that may not even be a metaphor. The lovely ‘Nobody Told Me I Was Dead’ is an acoustic strum in an established Exbats vein with a more developed, mysterious, lyric and a sweet closing line. The Exbats are from down in Arizona and ‘Hide My Baby’ is a song of border desperation in which they are, of course, on the side of love. A real winner to close on it finds them back in Ramones mode with cymbal crashes on the chord changes but also just a hint of country in the guitars.
As if to give the album a little encore they come back out with one of their old hits, revisiting ‘Hercules’ with their newfound synth toys. I don’t quite know what to tell you about that, ‘Hercules’ is an absolute gem of a song and a large part of how I came to love the band in the first place. They’ve re-recorded it before as well, but I don’t know how you improve on perfection. Anyway, get on the bus with this new record, let a little light into your dark, cold, world.
