Album Review

For many years now Scott McCaughey has been making a living as one of the auxiliary members of R.E.M., and as the leader of his one-time side project The Minus Five.

But before either of these endeavors came into the picture, McCaughey was the ringleader of one of Seattle’s best kept secrets, the Young Fresh Fellows. When I interviewed him shortly after the release of the Fellows last album, 2001’s Because We Hate You, he described the bands sound as “all over the place rock and roll.” A quite apt description of the foursome.

The bands early releases combined comedic wit with catchy garage rock, making numbers like “Just Sit,” “Amy Grant,” and “Beer Money” instantly memorable. Perhaps most impressive were the occasional pop nuggets, such as “Aurora Bridge,” which showed that these guys had some serious songwriting chops hidden amidst the goofiness. By 1989, the band’s original guitarist, Chuck Carroll, had departed, paving the way for the arrival of Kurt Bloch. Bloch, a veteran of the Seattle punk band The Fastbacks, added some great crunchy guitar to the Fellows’ sound, allowing This One’s For The Ladies and 1990’s Electric Bird Digest to veer more into raging Replacements territory.

By the mid-90’s the Fellows had slowed down considerably, releasing an odd album on a Spanish label in 1997 and playing only occasional shows. It has been eight years since the band’s last album, and since each member has his hands full with other commitments, the release of a new record, I Think This Is, seems like a minor miracle.

Oddly enough, to me, it sounds a bit closer to the Chuck era of the band than the Kurt era. The guitar crunch is really kept in check on this one, but the garage rock is in full-effect. Notable Sonics-style ragers include the one-two punch of “Suck Machine Crater” and “Let the Good Times Crawl.” The disc was produced by Robyn Hitchcock, and his influence is most readily apparent on a completely unique sounding Fellows track, “Used To Think All Things Would Happen,” which basically sounds like the band doing a Hitchcock cover. A truly great song though, in the tradition of Hitchcock’s hypnotic guitar lines, hints of psychedelia, and memorable harmonies.

Another highlight is the hysterical “Shake Your Magazines,” a song which tries to convince a bookworm to put down his novels in favor of periodicals. McCaughey cries out at one point, “In your coffee shop with your poetry/You think you’re pretty French but you’re not!” Great stuff. “Go Blue Angels Go” is classic Fellows humor as well, serving as an anthem for the Navy’s fabled Blue Angels flight demonstration team, even though I doubt they’ll pick up the song as a theme, since it alludes to crashing one of the planes into a lake full of hydroplanes.

Typical for the Fellows, the album wraps up with a couple of melancholy numbers, even veering into nostalgic territory on “Ballad of the Bootleg,” which throws in a bunch of interesting factoids about the band. Did they ever really write a song about Replacements’ drummer Chris Mars? According to the lyrics they did, but we all know how these rock and roll tales tend to get exaggerated. They also talk about throwing up “on the ceiling,” and, well, that just seems impossible.

So basically, I Think This Is is a pleasant surprise. It’s not the best Fellows album ever (see 1989’s This One’s For the Ladies to experience the band at their peak) but it’s still one of my favorites of the year so far. If you like your rock and roll all over the place then it should be right up your alley, if not, there’s always Rascal Flatts.

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