A couple of weeks ago I was loitering in Vulcan Video (one of the extra-hip/exhaustively-comprehensive video rental stores in Austin, for you out-of-towners) and, as I am wont to do to any music with a simple enough drum beat, found myself air-drumming gleefully along to the fuzz-garage rock those oh-so-hip hipster employees had chosen for the evening’s soundtrack.  This went on for a few minutes, until I stopped my miming to first realize and then ask, “Wait…this is amazing.  Who is this?”

Smith Westerns, HoZac Records

Just barely out of the confines of high school and all still in their teens, the future is now and the future is never for the Smith Westerns.  Their music possesses and is possessed of an urgency and unhinged excitement sorely lacking in most music today.  The playing is sometimes sloppy, the tempos sometimes fluctuate, the words are often (ok, usually) incomprehensible; while these characteristics in themselves don’t necessarily help the music, they don’t hurt it because the overall result is so thrilling that none of these things matter.

Smith Westerns is a successful album because it gets all the little things right: both the album’s flow and the individual songs themselves surge and back off at the right times; contrary to what one might expect from such a lo-fi album, the songs are subtly layered and dense; I don’t even really know what to say about the interplay between the lead vocal lines and the lead guitar lines, other than that it really, really works.  The songs are all very singable, comprised of quick but durable melodic hooks reminiscent at times of the doo-wop music of the ‘50s (but sped up, definitely sped up), and at other times of the similarly simple and effortless melodic sensibilities of the Ramones.

Lyrically, lead singer Cullen Omori keeps things simple, leaving room for our imaginations to take us back a few years and fill in the gaps with what we once thought was so important.  “Gimme Some Time” is a plea both to parents not to be prematurely written off (“I’ll be your favorite son/I’ll be your number one/ I hope…just give me some time”) and to a girl (“I wanna make you sweat/Don’t want you to forget/I hope…just give me some time”).  “Girl in Love” is a bit surer of itself: “I can tell by the stars in your eyes/That you’re a girl in love/Time goes fast when you want it to last/’Cause you’re a girl in love.”  “The Glam Goddess” is a love song for young love: “Oh girl you’re so neat/You make me complete/Come on baby let’s get sweet, you know….”  If “let’s get sweet” is a little vague, the ensuing “you know” mischievously hints at what getting sweet might entail.

That last line is especially revealing to the overall effect of the Smith Westerns’ music, which is that it takes something very complex—youth, growing up, and all the social and emotional baggage that comes along with it—and compresses it into a simple, digestible statement that nonetheless manages not to cheapen or belittle the subject matter.  That the music makes you dance and smile doesn’t cheapen the apprehensions that the music was born out of, but rather assuages them for a carefree couple minutes.  So take a half hour out of your day, give this record a spin, remember how it used to feel, and forget that you were ever so down or confused.

By Evan Butts