This Summer Doesn't Suck: A Review of "Sucking in the Summer"

April may be the cruelest month, but summer is the most ambivalent season. If you are not convinced, listen to Sucking in the Summer, Radio Free Nowhere's June 2006 CD. Beginning with its double-entendre title (is summer a time when things suck, or is it a fleeting moment to take in?), its opening samples of Bush Administration cronies whistling robustly in the dark as a regime implodes, and Jon Stewart's camp strains of "Everything's Coming Up Rose's" (itself a harrowing declaration whose triumphant words signal delusion and tragedy), Sucking in the Summer eloquently captures the essence of a season that sweetly, painfully conjures memory and desire.



For the reviewer whose musical tastes begin with Monteverdi's Orfeo Furioso (1607) and end with Your Hit Parade (1950 – 1959), the biggest surprise on Sucking in the Summer is its gentle nostalgia. Here, however, the wistfulness has a decidedly jagged edge. The musical quality of tunes like "Throw It All Away," "Song for the Sunshine," "Wonderful Place," and "Mardy Bum" - garage-band guitars; major-key melodies; bright ensemble vocals; bubblegum rhythms; retro instruments like the 16+2 organ (think "96 Tears" by ? and the Mysterians) – transport the listener to an innocent era. That is, until the lyrics' descriptions of (respectively) "bullshit and baggage," the monotony of consumer landscapes, shaky hallucinations, or the banal discouragement of one's little, everyday failings. The entrancing rhythms make the body want to move, but the mind won't allow it, preferring instead to concentrate, to take in the messages, to – in a manner of speaking - suck in Sucking in the Summer.



This tension is developed throughout the CD. The cheerfulness of "Let's Get Out of this Country" is as bright and upbeat as "I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke" but its jingle sells an apocalyptic message. Like some Reefer Madness pusher, the "Girlshapedlovedrug" awakens and fuels the desire to be intoxicated – or to intoxicate - again and again, regardless of the price. This sensitively-combined collection creates emotional ambiguity and tension in other ways, as well. Songs that are less inherently multifaceted are assembled in ways that create interesting nuances. The proximity of, for example, the hiply seductive bossa nova of Zuco's "Treasure" to the hypnotic rap-litanies of "Hand-Me-Downs" and "You Didn't Know That Though" leavens the latter and sharpens the former. All of these contradictions are the musical correspondent of the sunburn that follows an idyllic day of sunshine, or the vague sense of loss inevitably evoked by a summer memory.



In describing a CD that does so many things right it seems mean-spirited to identify the one thing it does wrong. If the music were less haunting and complex, the inserts might suffer less in the comparison. Next to the lyricism of the songs, however, too many of the inserts come off as brash and graceless –the ungainly, ugly-duckling little sister to the music's cool and goddess-like beauty queen. The introductory samplings are effective because they draw the listener in and set a tone. Toward the middle, they become intrusive and literal – the over-confident, lackluster class-clown who interrupts the more brilliant student's thoughtful remark. Radio Free Nowhere should trust the listener to draw conclusions and make connections the without being prompted by the cast of The Office or Stephen Colbert or Sarah Silverman, who is particularly overused.



But let's get back to the music, for music is the message here. The track that I found myself returning to again and again was number 11, Saint Etienne's "Teenage Winter." The poetry of its lyrics, many of them spoken-word observations delivered in a seductive, working-class London accent, is democratic and inclusive. Its rendering of shop windows, mistaken addresses, and other traces of a neighborhood that has changed since one's youth is reminiscent of the prose of Virginia Woolf or Marcel Proust in its stream-of-consciousness sensual details that transport the listener to multiple time periods at once. A better analogy is the turn-of-the-century photographs of Eugene Atget, whose silvery images of abandoned Paris vitrines captured two worlds in one image: moldering shop window vignettes of yesteryear, and contemporary street scenes coldly reflected in the glass that simultaneously reveals them and prevents entry.



"Teenage Winter's" two-word title encompasses the full range of this beautiful collection and the season it inaugurates. Summer is the season of youth. But after youth, it becomes a poignant kind of winter, awakening the sleeping personae of past summers just long enough for you to see how far they have receded since the last time you glanced backward. Waving hopefully even as they grow smaller and more distant, they are as tender as a summer romance, as melancholy as the early fall, and as inscrutable and ever-present as long shadows on a cool September morning.