Kelley Stoltz - Memory Collector
2006

It's taken me a long time to figure this out, but I think I'm getting it. In mainstream pop, and to some degree rock, familiarity is the ticket to record sales and success. Elvis took black R&B and put a white face on it, and wha-la, instant fame and recognition. Other examples spring to mind: Vanilla Ice bleached the ghetto out of rap; Billy Idol made spiked hair and a sneer a Top 40 commodity; the Stone Temple Pilots took Nirvana's angst to the bank.

And yet, the same does not hold true with indie rock -- originality is prized over all else. Bands like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Beirut, and Fiery Furnaces seem to have little in common on the surface, yet a closer look reveals bands with a stubbornly original identity. This comes as no surprise in a genre that thrives on unsettling the mainstream and must therefore take a contradictory stance. And yet, it leaves much great music undetected and underappreciated on what I feel are flimsy ideals. It is a world where the next big thing is only cherished before it is big. Indie rock, it would seem, lives cautiously in the future, with one eye fixated on an ever-shifting past.

In other words, if Stotlz had released this pastiche of Beach Boys harmonies and ELO tunesmithery in 1990, perhaps he'd be declared a genius. At the time, power-pop bands like Teenage Fanclub and the Replacements actually had a chance. Sixteen years later, merely mentioning the Beatles in a review puts the reader to sleep. This attitude, while probably inevitable, is detrimental to well-crafted music because it emphasizes context over content, fashion over form.

Don't get me wrong, Stoltz is no genius. A talented songwriter, yes, but certainly not a visionary of any kind. Songs jump from one touchstone to the next, as if Stoltz were playing the listener records from his collection. And yet, that same informal, derivative quality lends the album a levity that makes it easy to enjoy. It expects little of you, and you expect little of it. Why, after all, do many psych and garage fans prefer the imitators of the Rolling Stones and the Beatles to the actual legends themselves? Well, duh. It's because the copy cats were ten times more fun, and in their own way, more listenable.