The Playing Favorites, I Remember When I Was Pretty

Supergroup/Side Project Warning: The Playing Favorites are a group of indie musicians who have been or are in bands such as Lagwagon, Sugarcult, Penfifteen Club, Bad Astronaut, and The Rentals, just to name a few. After a late night out, Joey Cape and Luke Tierney, who were on tour together, hatched an idea for a band that would reunite old Santa Barbara-area friends, including Tim Cullen, Marko DeSantis, and drummer Mick Flowers. Living in different cities and being busy in other bands, the songs were written by shipping files via the Internet and adding parts to the songs. Then the crew all finally met for a week in a Los Angeles studio to record The Playing Favorites CD I Remember When I Was Pretty.

The CD has a pop-rock sound that differs in approach from song to song, due to the fact that there are four songwriters and frontmen in the group. You get the feeling, however, that these guys have been around the block and have no problem at all putting a song together. Actually, it’s quite an interesting exercise in songwriting to compare and contrast the styles. The Cullen- and DeSantis-penned songs are smooth and dreamy, for example, while Cape and Tierney wrote more gravelly, rockin’ tunes.

The overall production value of the album is very clean — perhaps too clean, making the album even more poppy and radio-friendly, and I think robbing it of some of its energy. I must admit that there’s not a bad song on the 14-song CD. On the other hand, though, I came away thinking this CD could have been so much better.

I Remember When I Was Pretty is a smart pop album, but it doesn’t really tread any new ground musically. I guess the sound is sort of a compromise of the musicians’ different styles. The lyrics tend to deal with life-passing-you-by ideas, scattering good lines throughout the disc like: “I’m just a thought you’ve been kicking around”; “That’s the sound of everyone else in the world”; “You’re gonna waste all your good years”; “This is the last train I will ride”; and “I got 16 years of this town in my lungs.” All solid ideas, accompanied by good hooks and riffs. It’s the total implementation of the songs that left me not bowled over.

On the instantly-likable song “Drug Hugger,” for one, the piano accents in what’s meant to be a rock song ruin it for me and waste the best lyric on the disc: “It’s hard to make it big / when you’re trying to make last call.” And on the song “Good Years,” it’s a great idea, but I just don’t like the build up before the chorus. On the song “This Is The Last Train,” it chugs along perfectly until a forced rhyme about “painting yourself red.” I just couldn’t let that fly; it derails the song for me. At the same time, opening song “Leaving Town” and the acoustic closing song “Citizen’s Band” are solid.

I guess I’m just torn, wondering what this CD could have been if it was a full-time band hammering down the songs, trying them out in the clubs, and fighting in the practice space. Instead, we’re left with a side project full of good ideas but lacking a finished, cohesive sound and focus.