Red Pony Clock: "God Made Dirt"
Happy Happy Birthday To Me Records, 2007
Someone was bound to take old Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass records and find the beauty in them. And then bring that ineffable sound into their own music and make it not only cool but use it to enhance what they already do well.
Gabe Saucedo has been writing ambitious and heartbreakingly sincere
music for years at this point. On this record, his songs, and those of
longtime collaborator, Tony Prudhome, prove that not only can pop music
be richly layered but also still has the ability to say interesting
things about our lives without peddling in tired, saccharine clichés.
The opening track, “Welcome Back,” is a joyful exploration of deep melancholy and all of its complex range of emotions that flow through you as you contemplate the grey-hued side of your existence but coming to terms with your nature as a human being.
There are a lot of uncomfortably thoughtful questions across this album. The songwriters are clearly concerned with the same issues as anyone else writing about pop music, they just delve a lot deeper and expose psychic insecurities with a refreshing, though perhaps unintentional, bravery. This gives each song a powerful vulnerability in an era when so many musicians are hiding behind masks or putting on a tough front for fear of appearing weak.
Red Pony Clock make their awkwardness, honesty and delicacy a virtue of their art. Many bands try to use non-traditional instruments and come off like poseurs because they make a big deal out of it. This band seems to create music conceptually and no instrument is included for the sake of doing so. It is as though they learned their 1960s-era Beach Boys music well and understood that sad music doesn’t have to be ugly, harsh and depressing. Rather, it can be catchy and serve as a means of transcending life’s low points.
“Take A Side” is typical of the record where social observations and commentary is brilliantly woven into expressions about the nature of the human heart. In this case, the perils of being fickle and unwilling to commit to a course of action and the importance of being true to yourself and others.
With lovely vocal harmonies, sensitively intelligent lyrics and breathtaking orchestral musical arrangements, God Made Dirt is classic Red Pony Clock and one of the best records out of the indie pop movement.
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