New Grenada
The Open Heart (Plumline)

originally published in Space City Rock, Fall 2003

In the early-to-mid-nineties, there walked upon this earth a special breed of indie rock, resplendent with angular guitars, sporadically sprinkled with (but not founded on) dissonance, delivered in a whiny smart-aleck slacker vocal style that wasn’t singing so much as talking in pitch and which would eventually point the way toward emo once its progenitors’ implicit lyrical interest shifted from the sounds of their of own voices to the beating of their hearts. Perhaps distraught that Possum Dixon and Arcwelder (and, for those who like fighting words, Pavement) failed to foment a proper movement in their wake, New Grenada throws down The Open Heart, and suddenly it’s 1994 and I’m spending my spring break visiting friends in the MIT student union instead of going to South Padre with all the steaknecks like everybody seems to tell me I should.

Well, everybody can go to hell, because New Grenada possess the one saving grace that all the truly great nerds possess: they don’t give a good goddamn just how freakin’ uncool they are. Note that two of the song titles on The Open Heart feature the word “Zaxxon,” which had the single worst visual perspective in videogame history, resulting in a seeming disconnect between anything you could do to the controls and the actions on the screen. That shows you where their allegiances lie, while dragging up nostalgic frustration and irritation and inadvertently summing up the album perfectly. So much of The Open Heart sounds like a great time that you almost don’t notice that you rarely get out of it what you put in. “Fuckfriends” is nice, what the Strokes would sound like if they didn’t have a major label bankrolling them, but it’s over at least a minute too soon, while the asking-for-trouble “Detroit Rock Sucks” throws out the line “Could you be more white/And have less to say/Than you do already?” and doesn’t expect us to raise an eyebrow (or maybe it does: sarcastic self-awareness is so very mid-’90s).

When they can be bothered to actually write a song rather than merely affect an attitude, New Grenada show that they could very well amount to something. “Tiger Thompson,” which seems to be about a séance but damned if I can say for sure, keeps building in tension through a combination of impropriety, infantilism and off-beat drumming. “I Know U R” could be electroclash with only minor tweaking, but don’t hold that against it; starting with an immature comeback that turns into a slam on scenesters, it blooms into an off-kilter post-new-wave pop tune with a quasi-flat guitar rhythm and a snide spoken-word interlude by bass player Nicole Allie that, in a perfect world, would generate royalties for Janeane Garafalo. The slow and sweet-sounding ballad “Steady Diet of Slayer” neither makes an obvious homage to the kings of satanic metal nor plays the contrast for high-larious irony. Instead, it uses the memory of the noise that happened to be playing at the time as a way of connecting to something that has passed. That’s when I discover that The Open Heart is precisely the type of album that, in my younger college days, would have made me go mental for a few weeks before I eventually realized that it wasn’t worth the bother. I suppose it’s a sign of maturity that I’m now able to come to that conclusion right away.

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