Written by: Dave Cantrell
If bands could be carbon-dated, one near absolute certainty is that the isotopic 14C decay reading would be greatest toward the origin point of said band. Not that we know the specifics around here at SEM (we are, after all, just music writers), but one imagines the radio-carbon devices chattering with vigor at the beginning of a band’s reign then slowly, if not precipitously, dropping off over their lifetime. Put more succinctly, if bands were trees, their rings would get closer together toward the bark as growth slowed from the drought of inspiration. Very few manage to keep themselves creatively robust throughout their own particular march through archaeological time. Of those few, The Monochrome Set may well be the least known, a fact that common sense – and certainly this record – suggests is an oversight worthy of a criminal investigation. Yes there have been a couple of lacunae to speak of, totaling fifteen years, but simple math puts paid to any suggestion that those two breaks matter. Twenty-two years of this buoyant marvel of a band wandering the earth is far more than anyone could have expected when Strange Boutique brought its jumpy pop shenanigans to our attention in 1980. If anyone had asked, I’m sure our built-in world-weary cynicism back then would have convinced us that something this wonderful couldn’t last. How sweetly gratifying to have that frequently accurate barometer proven wrong.
Since well before the dawn of The Monochrome Set the default setting for the citing of influences – by writers, mostly, but musicians and fans as well – has been the Velvet Underground and indeed TMS hasn’t escaped a similar fate but as with the Feelies, a doppelganger of sorts in this regard hailing from the oppositie shore, such influence is less than ostensible. Even as they injected it with a caffeinated, carbonated esprit de nerdiness, at least the kids from New Jersey adopted the VU drone aesthetic and so the lineage could be more easily traced. In contrast, The Monochrome Set, from the start, hasn’t made it easy. The link may indeed exist but it’s been so whimsically detoured through English music hall traditions and a kind of British Tin Pan Alleyness that the phrase ‘tenuous at best’ comes to mind. To these ears, the delight that has been The Monochrome Set has been to imagine a tight little gang of Frank Sinatras coming of creative age in the full flush of the punk resurrection, with the historic winds of Carnaby Street and Canterbury at their backs and a limitless prospect in front of them. Melody was clearly sacrosanct, a sense of cleverness – which is to say entertainment with a brain – not far behind, and, as was so often the case back then, a certain fearlessness prevailed. In the face of Unknown Pleasures, London Calling, Metal Box et al, it required a rather fierce self-belief to release a single like “Eine Symphonie Des Grauens” (as an example), some sort of inspired, imperturbable insularity. Perhaps because of that, perhaps because of the ballast the sound of their records offered, it felt, rather oddly, that the band had arrived at just the right time, insofar as they were, in a sense, outside of time. It’s a survivalist conundrum grounded in an invincible stylism that has served them well over the years and, very vividly, continues to. Spaces Everywhere, as much as 2013’s Super Plastic City, is every bit the matured match to ..Boutique, Love Zombies, Eligible Bachelors, etc.
Recent single (and TOTD here at SEM) “Iceman” brackets chilling, Lewis Carroll-like totalitarian imagery – “The Iceman, the Eggman, and something wicked cometh/you can hear the pattering of tiny hooves” is how it starts, all briskly shaped in Bid’s typically droll stylee – inside a pace and arrangement that matches pop for pop that vocal delivery, Lester’s lines (not quite 405 of them, I reckon) clear as the chrome on a general’s Bentley. “Fantasy Creatures” lays itself within a tropical sunset of sound like an anglicized JJ Cale, its chorus and bridge subtly spangled with a splash of road trip piano that’s splendid and emotional and this is TMS at their most romantic, though the twinkling “Rain Check” might well compete, a gentle swirl redolent of early evening soirees at eccentric North Yorkshire manors – 1930’s maybe, a casual wind across the moors – the easy silk ascot swing conjuring up that kind of sashaying offbeat mood as only these lads can manage. “The Z-Train” (that’s ‘zed,’ mind) is a propulsive highlight powered by an understated but determined little engine that can, drums scuttling down the track with an unquenchable spirit, bass on its tail, the lyrics tight as ever and trippingly clever.
There is, then, nothing to surprise here, beyond the pleasing and highly satisfying shock of The Monochrome Set not only putting out albums thirty-six years hence but making them as impeccably solid as ever, full of a kind of coherent, TMS-ed diversity. There’s a flute-flitting enigma called “The Scream” that braids together bucolic, light-hearted and vaguely disturbing, a blend innately underlined by a brief, chipped mandolin (unless it’s a uke?) that sets Tiny Tim down in the center of the Hot Five; the dreamy skewed nostalgia of “Avenue” with its “Roundabout” fanfare of flurried keyboard and echoed tom (imagine, Yes popping up on an album like this. Such cheek, such sacrilege), there’s the title track’s haunted perimeters and deeper still exploration of our evaporating pasts, as the sensory cues that marked them out change in ways both real and metaphorical, the amber hue of memory colored grey now, or, if you like, monochromatic. Elegiac, humbly aware of the elusive point to all this existence business as it hovers maddeningly just beyond our grasp, it’s as lovely a flight of reckoning as I’ve possibly ever heard.
Where all this leaves me, besides rather wryly ecstatic, is fervently hoping all this hologram business is feasible. I want to think of The Monochrome Set as eternal, forever shining under the lights of a jukebox-shaped stage, producing finessed pop gems full of sneaky snaky lyrics with inimitable ease. I mean, they’ve made it this far, so why not?
