Written by: Dave Cantrell
Ever been in a life-altering accident? I have, a week before Christmas 1986 when an inattentive doctor ran the red light at Bush and Fillmore and the small motorcycle on which I was a passenger T-boned the good doctor’s Suzuki Samurai with enough force to turn it over and send me flying 65 feet through the San Francisco night without a helmet. Neither the driver of the bike – my then-girlfriend – nor, obviously, I were killed but in very real effect that crash ultimately catapulted us 650 miles north to Portland 2½ years later. Sudden clashes with mortality can do that, apparently, just ask Allen Clapp and Jill Pries of semi-legendary crystalline pop-rock outfit The Orange Peels.
Stopped in traffic on the freeway south of that same storied city at the tail end of November 2013, on their way to the final date of the band’s Sun Moon tour, a drunk driver barreled into them from behind going 60 MPH. Due the sturdiness of their (totaled) van, exceedingly good if not random luck and perhaps the grace of a pop-loving god, the two walked away and even made it to the gig (that, my friends, defines ‘troopers’), but emotionally – and, it turns out, creatively – well, you never really walk away unscathed from something like that, do you?
photo courtesy The Orange Peels
Reflecting that fact, as well the further sense of life’s ever surprise-laden ways as they were forcibly uprooted from Clapp’s longstanding Mystery Lawn Studio in Sunnyvale (though they landed well, in the sylvan Santa Cruz woods outside Boulder Creek in a place now dubbed Mystery Lawn Mountain), Begin the Begone, from its lyrics to the very title itself, has an implicit taste of tumult to it. From the plead of charge-ahead first track “Head Cleaner” – ‘give me something, will ya…give me something familiar‘ – to the disorienta-pop of the pertinently titled “Fleeing the Scene” with its fraught, Hollies-like beauty, where that ‘fleeing’ is not directed in the direction you might think and that’s followed by the superb and ballad-y “New Moon,” all rattled-but-retained hope amid a glorious drench of keys and the embroidered chime of guitar, clear through to the rumbustious, percussive thunder of “Post & Beam” – drummer and first-time producer Gabriel Coan going all Thor-with-a-Max Roach-jones on us – that acts as a limb-loosening intro to the powerpop boogie of “9,” a kind of roadhouse romp (Orange Peels-style) abetted by the unleashed yet pristine guitar work of John Moreman that had me thinking Jeremy Spencer in his prime and that evolves in the end into a bit of popsike regalia, this album rather glistens with the kind of mortal resolve that only a near-death experience can occasion. Fatalism, if of an inevitably resilient sort, soaks the bars and arrangements of these nine tracks like a heavy, glad-to-be-alive morning dew.
That said, however, for a record the process and backdrop of which would indicate a band skating rather perilously on the razor-edged brink, Begin the Begone, though not without urgency – with some irony, ‘drive’ would seem to be the watchword – unspools with a taut but deliberate charm, underscoring the fact that there’s little these four can do that doesn’t come up bright (however defined), melodious trumps. “Embers” has a suave, shoulder-swaying finger-snapping ease that seems to emanate from The Orange Peels in a constant aura, the faultless “Satellite Song,” full of abundance and yearn, tells you everything you need to know about what Teenage Fanclub aiming their quiver at the Beach Boys would sound like (fabulous, as it turns out), while the Lennon-ish dream of “Wintergreen” that closes the album in a gleaming shower of cascading piano, coils of psychy guitar, some sheets of ascendant keyboard and an arrangement that pulls it all together like the Zombies in excelsis, is simply the words ‘pop purity’ written in the air of a gelid January morning.
Whereas the work here and the immediacy within may well have been propelled by trauma – Begin the Begone is, tellingly, the quickest they’ve ever followed up a previous LP – one realizes after listening that, yes, that is indeed true, but still, a record of this quality coming from The Orange Peels? That, my friends, is no accident.
