Release Date: March 22, 2011
It’s times like these that make you wish we were in the early ’90s, huh? The economy was better, we weren’t fighting two (three, four) wars, and Built To Spill and Superchunk were touring the country as doe-eyed, sharp-teethed youngsters hell bent on changing the scene. Weezer, Pavement—Chris Farley movies?! Damn, what the hell are we doing living in this messed up millennium?
This, in a sense, is the type of feeling BOAT wants to conjure on their fourth proper release, Dress Like Your Idols. They boast no qualms about being endlessly referential (their album cover is a retooling of some classic Pavement, Pearl Jam and Elliott Smith album covers), nor do they need to make grand gestures with their references. BOAT may not be smart, but at least they’re fun about their stupidity. They most closely resemble Nathan Williams of Wavves without the bratty coke-fiend streak, and Dress Like Your Idols is a rollicking half-hour of summer jam pop-rock, straight out of the (first) Bush Era.
While Wavves’ humor is often of the acerbic, self-deprecating Peter Pan-complex ilk, BOAT frequents the old Superchunk and Pavement stomping ground of suburbia. “This is a changing of the guard/I’m cleaning dog shit off my yard,” or so goes the semi-anthem opener, achieving both arm-reaching ambition and cul-de-sac ennui. The album pours forth in the same fashion, crafting itself as a retro-slacker break-up album, always talking about “I’m gonnas” and never really getting around to “I’m doings.” Protagonists are despondent and passive (“Landlocked,” “Kinda Scared of Love Affairs”), and most of all have a fairly cynical take on wanting things that aren’t romance (“Dress Like Your Idols”).
In BOAT’s world, as in early ’90s indie-rock, nobody cares and nobody does anything, which fine because you’re only listening to a record.
This is a dangerous precedent to set, one that eventually hamstrings BOAT as a lesser version of Superchunk, touring in support of more transcendent artists that pass them by along the Northwest indie rock pipeline. They could be cousins of The Thermals, but the breadth of talent BOAT can sometimes express proves they have more upside than their Portland pals. But what The Thermals do with their limited guitar chunk far surpasses the sum of its parts. BOAT, unfortunately, sounds like exactly what they are: talented slacker indie-poppers, capable of nothing more than subsuming Modest Mouse, Pavement, Weezer and slack-jawed romanticism into a perfectly fulfilling whole.
But really, why would you listen to BOAT just to talk about their missed potential as a band? It’s way too sad, and unbefitting of a band that can craft such lively hooks. “Bite My Lips” grabs a guitar line from Free Energy, a similar retro-sound band incapable of surpassing their limitations; “Classically Trained” yanks playful tongue-in-cheek ’50s references from Weezer; “Landlocked” is quite easily the greatest song Rooney never wrote, which is a compliment if you think about it. BOAT is a band that doesn’t belong on the pages of a music blog—they’re too slack-jawed and bored. BOAT belongs in your car, on your walk to work, or on that last half mile on your fixie bike. Dress Like Your Idols, a record with no ambition, succeeds simply because it exists, and it’s a pretty good time. Shit, it’s the ’90s right? What the hell are blogs anyway?
BOAT – Dress Like Your Idols
- “Changing of the Guard”
- “Bite My Lips”
- “King Kong”
- “L-O-V-E”
- “Forever in Armitron”
- “Classically Trained”
- “Water it Down”
- “Kinda Scared of Love Affairs”
- “Landlocked (featuring J. Roderick)”
- “Do the Double Take”
- “Frank Black Says”
- “Noises in the Night”
- “Dress Like Your Idols”
