| Anyone who spends too much time listening
to pop music, with all of its melodic formulas and harmonic predictability, should find
the counter-intuitively catchy tunes of The Changes refreshing and promising.
This new band of local twentysomethings, which
has been making the rounds of Chicago's small club scene and recently toured New York
City, plays with a rough, buzzy sound that may make some listeners throw their music on
the garage band shelf. Listen more closely, though, and you'll notice the foursome are
regularly riffing on jazz chords and managing the nifty trick of wrapping infectious but
unpredictable pop melodies around sometimes dissonant, polyrythmic arrangements. They'll
leap from 4/4 punk to semi-mellow jazzy instrumentals with driving drums to the odd reggae
rhythm and back to jazzy riffs, all while retaining a distinctive pop voice.
The Changes first recording, which the band has
been giving away at concerts, sets all the above-described ingenuity in strictly unadorned
White Stripes-esque peppy garage punk, but the band unveiled an even greater range of
versatility before an obviously charmed crowd of around 40 fans on Wednesday, April 30 at
The Hideout (a cozy club which hides its warm, welcoming concert room like some Gen-X/Y
speakeasy behind a dingy white-trash facade on a nearly inaccessible stretch of Wabansia
beneath the shadow of the Kennedy).
Singer-songwriter-guitarist Darren Spitzer
grinningly bounced his way through the band's off-beat oeuvre of surprising and catchy
songs. His lyrics are full of unprofound but oddball slices of life well-suited to the
spazzy punctuation of the arrangements, with plenty of punchy, smile-provoking phrases
placed at climactic moments rifled with drummer Jonny Basofin's high-hats and cymbals. For
example: "I'm only scared that I might run into you. Then I gotta run home and get
sick..."
Spitzer, who at another such climactic chorus
moment complains that a friend talks to women like a crazy man ("What are you
thinking?? Do I have to hold your hand though any situation?"), is himself very good
at warbling like a crazy man when the lines call for it. Then, half a measure later, he'll
slip into something sweet, melodic and casual. He sounds a bit like McCartney here, a bit
like Sting there, but at his best moments is managing to sound only like Spitzer.
One of The Changes' more obvious influences
would seem to be The Police, who created similar combinations of jazz chords, reggae
rhythms and punk-rock sensibility. After I finished my first couple of spins of The
Changes' seven-track EP I found the band's arrangements continuing to run through my head
with Sting's voice replacing Spitzer: "I can't, I can't, I can't stand
losing..." I was also reminded a bit of the alt-country/alt-rock versatility Wilco
and Andrew Bird's recent forays into garage rock.
I was surprised to find I couldn't stop playing
the CD. The melodies are catchy enough to be immediately likeable, but unconventional
enough to bear repeated play without getting tiresome. Spitzer's vocals in particular
benefited from the chance to play perfectionist in the studio. Recorded by local engineer
Jeremy Lemos, who has worked with Wilco and Sonic Youth, the seven tracks offer a concise
if little-embellished showcase for the band's genuinely fresh style of songcraft.
Still, the band's recordings to date don't do
justice to the stylistic versatility of the group's live show, which benefits from
generous shadings of alt-country and other genres. Near show's end, the band even indulged
an extended sort of prog rock-esque jam with just one lyric: "I only care about
myself." A few minutes before, they had slipped seamlessly from some typically quirky
observations about the oddities of "my work friends" into a lovely pedal steel
country slo'dance cover of "Stop In the Name of Love."
Spitzer and his talented bandmates have the look
of a band to watch for the long-term: they've hammered out an recognizable recipe for
original pop songs but also appear to be sitting on a larger collection of tricks to
diversify their routine at a later date.
The band's most conventionally poppy song,
"Such a Scene"--a driving rock number with McCartney-like melody--won some
airplay recently on Q101's local music show. The song, if not this particular recording,
seems the band's most obvious candidate for singledom, though it sits somewhere between
the insta-familiarity of radioland and a sort of slower-to-grow charm. My personal
favorites on the CD are the band's fresher, subtly jazzy rock numbers like "I Don't
Need You" and "A Week Off of You."
The Changes' set on April 30 was followed by The
Saturday Nights, a young group of émigrés from Bloomington, Indiana who are quite in
love with good Brit-rock. Their UK influences are as diverse as Robin Hitchcock and The
Clash, but the highlight of the Saturday Nights' set was an extended melodic angst-rock
tune cut quite clearly in the mold of Radiohead, which gave way into a long jam during
which one of the two lead singer/songwriter/guitarists dropped his electric six-string and
launched in on a jazzy sax solo.
Photos provided by Beth Shandles
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