Posies
Success
PopLlama
How’s this for irony: The Posies entitle their final album Success (remember, their debut was called Failure) and with the prophetic “Somehow Everything.” As the lyrics suggest, it’s “Such a sad demise… /Now you realize/Somehow everything will be a little different than you thought.” If “Somehow Everything” doesn’t get tagged onto the opening credits of a 1998 Fall Season Friends-style sitcom, I’ll eat my hat. After such important contributions to intelligent power pop as four nearly-perfect records and a pure genius cover of the Germs’ “Richie Daggers Crime” (that cops musical motifs from not one but two Beatles classics), how can they just throw in the fucking towel like that? Considering their only real competition is Toad the Wet Sprocket, I don’t get it.
There’s going to be a yawning gap where we once had the Posies Ticket-to-Ride jangly guitars, sweet harmonies, sometimes dark but generally optimistic, self-referential lyrics, and wild sense of something like exuberant melancholy that could always give the heart a firm squeeze. There aren’t going to be any more “Fall Apart With Me”s, “Placebo”s, and love songs to Typewriters. Like losing a dear friend – being caught somewhere between celebrating a life and mourning a death – the body isn’t quite cold yet, but right now it hurts too much to talk about it. PopLlama Products, P.O. Box 95364-2364, Seattle, WA 98145
