”EVERYTHING ON THIS ALBUM IS ON PURPOSE”
-- Interbabe Concern liner notes.

The Loud Family are my pick for the greatest pop band in the world. (Two semi-famous musicians who agree with me: Aimee Mann, and Veruca Salt’s Nina Gordon.) All five of their albums so far strike me as brilliant. Still, it is their 1996 Interbabe Concern that is my pick for the greatest pop album in history. I use “pop” advisedly.

The Rheostatics, my favorite band (period), I over-simplify as “folk-rock”. By this I mean that even when the Rheostatics are jazz animals, or play original New Wave rock, or play ominous shards of guitar over anxious harmonies, or blast through a 7/8-time punk song, or sample toy instruments or sing “Power Ballad for Ozzy Osbourne”, they approach music like folk-rockers. Their songs tell stories; their harmonies sound as if Dave and Tim and Martin grew up together singing at campfires; their melodies whipsaw through the hedges next to trails once blazed by Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell and Bruce Cockburn.

The Loud Family, on the other hand, are pop because leader Scott Miller sings about crushes and longing and heartbreak (and lady wrestlers); because the band consists of whoever Scott currently gets along best with; and because it’s no surprise when Scott’s online lists of the Top 20 Albums of each year award the #1 rankings of 1965-70 to (respectively) Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper, the White Album, Abbey Road, and Let It Be. His melodies, like those of the Beatles, bob and weave and tumble ecstatically, as harmonies caress or challenge them with equal glee. He writes verses catchy enough to be choruses, choruses catchy enough to identify themselves even among his verses, and bridges that (as Golden Gate once did) require whole new branches of math to build without falling over. Pop, and the Loud Family, are devoted to the art of tunes.

Tunes, at least, above all the other cool stuff music offers. Thus my favorite pop album ever starts with a harsh cascade of guitar drones … which retreats into soft notes as Scott muffledly states “That’s it, without the” … then reappears, only to fade behind a flutter of flutes and drums as Scott’s low urgent voice repeats “That’s it, that’s it, that’s it”. Then, without warning, we’re tossed into a jangly college-radio pop song, or at least the see-sawing prelude: it’s a sung conversation, left speaker to right speaker. “So you’ve got a new girl, better tell us all about her” (gentle, higher-pitched Scott). “Well, we met” (starts his slightly whiny and croaky, but assertive, normal voice), but comes the interruption: “No, we were thinking of lascivious detail”. “Well, she’s a little like” – and now, fully warmed up, we step into a dizzying octave-plunging sing-along – “tendon-slash dimension-crash entropica/ cryogen magenta kevlar ebola”.

Here’s the sad thing: we’re maybe 75 seconds into Interbabe Concern, and all hope of a mass audience for these tunes is gone. The sung conversation resumes, and I don’t see a thing hard to understand about it: Scott is telling of a girlfriend whose sudden rages frighten him, and control him. He’s telling of how the only way he can seek the girl’s sympathy is through self-pity, acting wounded (“Do you see a way to gain some control?” “Shiver fits when it’s cold”). I bet 80% of the pop radio audience knows this story in detail, by experience or by watching. Most of the key words aren’t big hard words at all (“sharing, caring, WARLIKE! WARLIKE!” or “the way they say she treats you”).

But I’ve seen people, good friends of mine, retreat in fear. They worry that “cell-disrupting, will-corrupting vertigo/ exponential existential horror-show” could not be understood without an M.S. in biology, a grad thesis on Schopenauer and Alfred Hitchcock, and a mastery of math, Jean-Paul Sartre, and how the two productions of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre compare and contrast.

I hope you’re not those people. You don’t need every possible nuance to _know_ those words aren't safe and comfy. You don’t need to know the uses of “Sodium Laureth Sulfate” (the song title) to sing and clap along when Scott’s perkiest voice sings “My girlfriend’s got sodium laureth sulf/ sodium laureth sulfate hair” four times at the song’s end. Or if, like me, you do need to know, you’ll look it up. Right? It’s a common shampoo chemical suspected – maybe quite unfairly – of causing cancer. It also makes your girlfriend’s hair shiny and pretty. You get the drift.

**********
The Loud Family are a brilliant pop band because so many of their pleasures are simple. Back in the 1980’s, when they (Scott Miller and His Amazing Rotating Cast) were known as Game Theory, they even had college radio semi-hits, earned on wispy enthusiasm and the help of R.E.M’s then-producer Mitch Easter. The goofy humor in “I Wanna Get Hit by a Car”, the lost but bouncy futility in the words of “Nine Lives to Rigel Five” and “Erica’s Word”, the celebratory guitar of “Chardonnay”, and the big tunes that kept dodging cliché: all were enough, I guess, to overcome tinny sound and the fact that Scott, at the time, sang like a dorky 12-year-old.

By Interbabe Concern, the easy selling points had improved. Scott had become a fierce, rocking guitarist with a new guitar tone every two minutes. Dawn Richardson had come aboard as a solid, hard-hitting drummer. And Scott, reaching puberty in his early 30’s, had fully emerged as an excellent, expressive vocalist. His voice is low and sinister on “North San Bruno Dishonor Trip” ; soft, stoic, and deadpan on “Screwed Over by Stylish Introverts” ; strained and half-convincingly shouty on “I No Longer Fear the Headless” ; scornful and fake-macho here, urgent and informative there on “Top Dollar Survivalist Hardware” ; high but still male and strong and fast-moving on “Such Little Nonbelievers”.

True, his finest moments as a singer may be his most feminine. To gorgeous melodies, he sings high, breathy, heartbroken couplets like “I didn’t know how your kisses felt/ until I saw you kiss someone else”. Or, to dignified harmonies, “I’m not expecting that I’ll end up with you, just because I need to/ I shouldn’t count on having air around, just because I breathe”.

I’m not a huge fan of Scott’s old work with Game Theory cuz, well, I’m a guy. A weight-lifting, baseball-loving, toilet-fixing, insect-gently-removing, fake-meat-grilling, salt-and-rosemary-and-oregano-of-the-earth studly guy. So I don’t want guy singers sounding like sissies all the time. But used with care, as in the Loud Family, it can be beautiful, beautiful stuff.

**********
If you’re _extremely_ studly – if you party every day then exit light, enter night, living after midnight, shaken all night long without even a break for a nice bowl of cereal – then I do hear how you’ll never get past the content of Interbabe’s lyrics. Scott is a romantic, fond of swoons and crushes, and in good times he writes a good love song. Plants and Rocks and Birds and Things (the Loud Family debut) ended with “Give-In World” which might, in a kinder world, have been my favorite love song ever. It was his wedding song to an attractive singer/guitarist named Shalini Chatterjee: “It’s a back-off world, and will you stand some hard ground with me?”.

By 1996, the song had been ever-so-slightly tainted (though I still love it) by her answer: “No”. She left Scott – skinny, poofy-haired genius of tumbling melodies – for his producer Mitch Easter, a skinny, poofy-haired genius of tumbling melodies who I guess she liked better. Interbabe Concern is Scott’s divorce record. It doesn’t have an “I Will Survive” on it, and if you glance at the song lyrics once each, you might read a lot into that.

Voice slow and roughened, he seems to mean it when he sings “I’m asleep and awake at the same time, not a drunk driver, just a driver”. He sounds just as sincere adding “Get off, out of courtesy, you Elm Street crawlers, and leave crazy men room to die”. Another song’s chorus ends “Do me a favor, forget me quick when I’m gone”. And while I think “I’m Not Really a Spring” may be the greatest pogo-and-caffeine-rush pop song I’ve ever heard, the final gliding synthesizer hides the words “Having a lover was not, strictly speaking, enough to live on, but now I do not”.

Nine years before I had nine years’ hindsight, though, I wasn’t worried. For one thing, Interbabe never features a man begging or groveling. He considers it, but has the strength to back off into more productive reactions. Harshness, for example: that has healing value. “Are you sure all your problems were me?/ I think we missed our chance to be free” edges away from a plea and grants the obvious: “Your big project is finding the perfect way to leave me/ and everyone needs their own big project”. Being judgmental, in emergencies, can keep self-hate down by spreading the hate more evenly: on some level Mitch deserved to be praised, over rococo Pet Sounds desolation, as “Someone who would never steal (unless you ended up with something that he wanted)/ who would never screw you over (if there weren’t some slight advantage)/ or snap your last shred of self-respect (all other things remaining equal)”.

From another vantage point, maybe Mitch’s behavior looks fair, romantic, a rescue of a girl stuck with some passive-aggressive brainiac. Or not, and he’s scum: I don’t know, I wasn’t there. I did go buy both of Shalini’s subsequent albums, produced and sometimes co-written by Mitch. (We Want Jelly Donuts [2000] is jangly and tuneful, Metal Corner [2004] a loving tribute to eighties’ cock-rock but with charmingly flat girl vocals and non-dumb lyrics.) Interbabe Concern is Scott’s story, though, and what elevates it from brilliant to Brilliantest Ever is that once he’s done apologizing, blaming, and reminding himself to move on – “I’m on my feet, I’m on the phone demanding answers/ Maybe I’d better just sit down” – he does move on. He has some fun.

**********
You could tell that from the song titles, right? Or the geeky album cover, with the letters in Loud Family gently altered to make calculus-level math symbols. You could tell it, too, from the wordplay (the buff group-chanted reduction of “survivalist!” to “survival! Servile! Vile!”). From the brief, lame cocktail piano of “Hot Rox Avec Lying Sweet-Talk”. From the bouncy combining of quantum physics, anime, and the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders into one verse. From the outward-looking tale of prejudice and enlightenment that is “I No Longer Fear the Headless”. And, certainly, from the two snappiest history lessons I’ve ever seen squeezed into a blaring rock song:

“Alexander lived in times before the Duke of Earl.
The Greeks all told him that he threw the discus like a girl.
He didn’t have a healthy outlet for his anger, so he took over the world.
L. Ron Hubbard was a science fiction protégé
Who couldn’t stand to see his royalties get taxed away.
Now big celebs are walking ‘round who think he’s Jesus, what would David Koresh say?”

But above all – and here we come back to the album’s beginning – Interbabe Concern is the first album Scott produced for himself (honk if you have any theories why! or if you're an adorable pet goose!). He spends it testing the limits of what pop can be. He’d done that anyway; the Beatles didn’t stick too long with “She Loves You”, either, good a song as it was. But on Interbabe, helped especially by the crazed keyboarding mind of Paul Weineke, almost every song overflows with sonic ideas that are just cooooool. New. Fun for a frustrated new divorcee to play with. But also, I can vouch, fun for a married guy to listen to in the company of a gay ex-ladies'-man bachelor and a brave young damsel in mid-escape from Riker's. Cool noise is for all ages and lifestyles.

“Don’t Respond, She Can Tell” keeps time with a marble. (Hear and watch the very grainy video on music.yahoo.com.) The first few seconds of “I’m Not Really…” reverberate at CIA death frequency. “Asleep and Awake on the Man’s Freeway” gently whistles like R2D2’s teakettle on holiday. “Screwed Over…”’s semi-programmed toy piano skitters up and the down the notes faster (and somehow more heartbreakingly) than Ben Folds, a producer, and a computer to fix his shiitty tracks. “Where They Sell Antique Food” waves yawning vocorders over a cliff where firecrackers are being set off.

“Just Gone” is straightforward, a would-be hit in a fairer world, but I like how Kenny Kessel plays heavy rock bass amid its yearning balladry. As for the album’s closer, “Where They Walk over Saint Therese”, it’s mostly majestic and sad, a final declaration (“Hard to get close to, born to pass by/ I want to promise it’s worth holding onto/ Wrong not to want to always try”). But it’s also the grand parade, in the distant background, of some of the sonic ideas scattered among the 18 previous songs.

**********
Whatever I don’t know about Scott Miller’s first marriage – he’s seven years into his second now, yay! – I do think there’s one clear injustice surrounding Interbabe (besides its mere 15,000 album sales) and the prior two Loud Family records. Paul Weineke and original L.F. guitarist Zach Smith had already been leaders of their own rock band. Each contributed original songs to the first two albums, and though Smith then left, Weineke wrote and sang “Uncle Lucky” – a boppy, rhythmic, nasal little guitar song – on Interbabe. The Loud-fans discussion group is highly active, and for some reason, many of my fellow Loud-fans went out of their way, again and again, to post messages about how Smith’s and Weineke’s songs stunk.

I don’t get it. Weineke and Smith are, like Miller himself, literate, tuneful, and interesting. Their songs strike me as obviously excellent, and half of ‘em fit the album flows perfectly. “Uncle Lucky” didn’t, but a song that had nothing to do with romantic failure made, say I, a useful rest in the proceedings. Yet by the next Loud Family album, both musicians had stopped making music, apparently forever. I have to think the reactions to their songs made them bitter and hurt.

Sometimes, sure, bitterness and hurt can make great music. But not by themselves: not without gadgets and gizmos. Not without stories and humor and the joy of a good harmony. And not, the performances make clear, without the help of friends. That’s the survival story Interbabe tells, and the one worth being inspired by. And memorizing. And singing.

Recommended: Yes