Mild 7
Demos For Stella  (One Take)
Friends of Mild 7
Songs We Learned In Texas  (Little Gray)
by Marc Hirsh

originally published in Space City Rock, Fall 2003

Mild 7’s Demos For Stella and the tribute disc Songs We Learned In Texas make me feel like a woman. A specific woman, in fact: Lisa Schwartzbaum, movie critic for Entertainment Weekly. A few years ago, director Barry Levinson took umbrage with some comments that she made while panning his now-forgotten sci-fi flick Sphere, internalized them and chose to respond in the form of his next film, the now-forgotten coming-of-age flick Liberty Heights . While I can’t claim to have had quite that impact on Mild 7, my… let’s just say “discouragement” of their Unfiltered was enough for member Seth Hurwitz to email me with a plea to listen to the duo’s latest releases with an open mind. It’s not as cool as inspiring a movie (or being effectively written into one, as was the case of the 1998 Godzilla, which featured a pudgy and ineffective Mayor Ebert and his unpleasant bald aide Gene), but, hey, you’ve gotta start somewhere.

Still, this sounded like either a setup at best or masochism at worst, since what you have here is a musician asking a critic who hated his last album to review his new one (which leaves the weird possibility that he’s a bigger fan of me as a reviewer than I am of him as a performer). I can say without contradiction, though, that Hurwitz is a genuinely nice guy; he wasn’t interested in picking a fight (though God knows that Space City Rock could use the publicity of a public feud), just a bit bummed out by my review, and our exchange even expanded beyond the initial topic (to the point where we discovered that we both attended the same Jewish day camp in Maryland at more or less the same time). But if I find Mild 7 any more palatable now than I did before, you’d need an accurate measuring device to detect it.

What’s most problematic is the impression that Hurwitz and co-conspirator Andrew Porter are more committed to the concept of Mild 7 than they are to that concept’s trappings, which would be the songs and performances. It’s tempting to blame the fact that they’re a mostly acoustic duo, but Lord knows that Tall Dwarfs and the Mountain Goats have gone further with just a bit more and much, much less, respectively, than what Hurwitz and Porter have to give on Demos For Stella. For one thing, the music itself provides almost no momentum, serving almost entirely as backdrop for the lyrics rather than standing on their own, and melodies are almost nonexistent. That throws the presumptive focus of any Mild 7 song onto the words, and they try to have a field day, centering songs around conceits such as alien abduction, six-fingered girls and the utopia promised by Ramones songs. Unfortunately, they’re concerned with the rhymes themselves but not what they signify, so you sense their satisfaction in each individual line without getting any sort of indication as to why any of those details are important beyond showing you how clever Mild 7 are. That leaves a huge gaping hole in songs like “The Redondo Beach Song” (which starts out “I met her in Redondo just like Jean-Paul Belmondo” and just gets worse from there) where the point should be.

I’d be lying, however, if I said that it didn’t sound like Hurwitz and Porter were occasionally putting a bit more thought and effort into their project (and I’d be egotistical to assume that my earlier review was in any way responsible), because Stella does indeed improve on Unfiltered at times. The opening “Greenland,” for instance, is nicely restrained, adding tension by referring to but not explaining the past (“I’ll go with you wherever you go/But not to Greenland/I’m not going back there again”), while “Neighbors” is a subtly disquieting look at the way your conception of community can be revealed as a sham in a single unfortunate instant. But moments like that seem less like improvements than anomalies, and Hurwitz and Porter quickly revert to old habits like their atrocious cover of “I Ran.” I mean, I’m more sympathetic towards A Flock Of Seagulls than probably anybody you’ll ever meet, but Mild 7’s version is just terrible, with one guitar out of tune and the other barely hitting the beat.

So we’ve seen that Mild 7 themselves often can’t be bothered with their material; what happens when folks who actually care about the songs have a go? The answer is somewhere on Songs We Learned In Texas, but the problem is that it should be everywhere. A tribute album put together by those being covered (something that always bugs me in its control-freak self-aggrandizement), Songs We Learned promises to throw real bands at Mild 7 songs, but most of the participants are generally faceless indie pop acts that are pretty far down the lo-fi ladder themselves. That makes for a remarkably consistent tone throughout the record, but the performances seldom accomplish more than what the bare minimum should have been when Mild 7 recorded these songs in the first place.  

That’s still an improvement over the original albums, though, and the best of the lot go one step further and don’t try to hammer the jokes home, which is just as well, since they’re not particularly funny anyway. The straightforward version of “Greenland” by Seamus&thePockets that opens up the disc is quite nice, even if it kills some of the song’s impact by eliminating the final line of the chorus. Christa Forster’s “Microscopic Organisms” is even better, as musically nervy as parts of Exile In Guyville , although that only serves to underscore the lyrical problems (it’s bad enough that the girl in the song is “fresh as a daisy in a bomb crater,” but it quickly becomes clear that that’s only there to set up the rhyme). And the Glen Nevous Retraction’s complete recasting of “Not My Good Eye” should satisfy those who loved the Replacements’ “Answering Machine” but wished it wasn’t laden with all that, you know, poignancy and depth.

Most of Songs We Learned is redundant, though. As I’ve mentioned, these are lyric-driven songs and they’re performed as such, which leaves Mild 7’s weaknesses front and center. Nobody takes advantage of the opportunity to really beef up any of these songs, and there’s yet more evidence that Hurwitz and Porter lack the ability or desire to edit when we get two versions each of “Russian Love,” “UFoze” and “Just A Boy.” Obviously, the judicious thing to do would have been for them to pick one of each (or, in the case of “Just A Boy,” neither) and break the bad news to three acts that their songs wouldn’t make the cut. They left them on, though, possibly out of goodwill and gratitude to the people who like their music. That makes them great guys, but it doesn’t mean you have to listen to them.

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