| The total effect is both locked into the time that gave it birth and utterly timeless: this stuff will never get old. “You’re Not Alone,” toward the end of the album, serves as a sort of highlight of this dizzying swirl of history that remains current no matter how old it gets, busting out the no-wave skitter tempos as if they were New Things (which, at the time, they pretty much were, unless you’d been listening to lots of records on the ESP label) for half the song while Stim occasionally intones, “Oh, now we’re in the thick of it, dude,” before the band finds a two-chord progression it likes and slides effortlessly into a near-pop careen that evokes both the open highway leading into the nearly-visible then-Future and the roads that lesser-known just-recently-current bands had collapsed trying to follow. In its organ-driven, understated climax, “You’re Not Alone” comes off sounding like a permanent thing. How many records will come out this year -- this decade -- about which one can say even half as much? We should all be so lucky as to age so gracefully, and we should stand up and take notice when something else manages to pull it off and sound like it’s having so much fun in the process. |