Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin- Tape Club

Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin- Tape Club

(2011, Polyvinyl Records)

For when there’s a lull with nothing to post about, I’ve kept this back in reserve. One of my favourite bands of the last 10 years who create music that occasionally hits me like a truck (‘House Fire’, ‘Some Constellation’) or takes a while to sink in (most of Broom), but always succeeds in wriggling inside my brain-box and building a nest for itself: Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin. I wrote about them earlier (see here) and as you may know, they were an "of the moment" band on US-based indie blogs around 2005 when recording Broom, their first album. This was a home-recorded, extremely lo-fi record and had very little to say for itself in the way of production, but stood out promisingly for its tunes. An internet following was born.

Since Polyvinyl picked Broom up and released it, the commercial fortunes of Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin- or SSLYBY for short, arguably waned slightly according to speculation from loyal adherents. Thankfully though, their music and passion didn’t. Two diverse, lively and enjoyable records followed in 2008 and 2010, Pershing and Let it Sway respectively, filled with shamelessly catchy pop tunes. Broom, re-released for Record Store Day in April this year with some new tracks- that first home-recorded record, now sits atop a small number of dreamy indie kids’ post-2000 lists as a cult pop classic. I give mine a listen quite regularly, and often wonder what in those loosely formed arrangements and hushed vocals keeps me coming back. But it does. And regularly.

Their honeyed sound and image isn't for everyone. However, if you’re a fan of good music without pretence; a follower of healthy tunes over fashion, SSLYBY are one of the best bands to draw into your listening arsenal. Cavorting with my ears through train journeys, helping while away 40 minutes in town or sound-tracking an evening with friends before heading out, SSLYBY can be taken anywhere (and will take you anywhere) with their infinite lightness.

I turn to the reason for this post: Tape Club, a 26-song compendium of b-sides that SSLYBY will release in October. How impossible to imagine that a band as lo-fi as SSLYBY would even have b-sides. How much more demo-like could they be, especially the b-sides from Broom?! Well in their seven-year fringe-of-the-public-zeitgeist tenure, and ten years as a band, their production values have wilfully soared and plummeted as much as a kite on the breeze. It makes SSLYBY sound like two different bands, one playing at Will Knauer’s house in a suburb of Springfield, Missouri, and one recording in a high-tech, gee whizz, sound-proofed studio. (In reality, even the uber-polished Pershing was recorded at Knauer’s aunt’s house).

So sound varies wildly. At the end of ‘What We’ll Do’, you can literally hear the tape stop; on ‘Song 1000’, the band just about hold things together while they muck around with (what sound like) kazoos. At the other end of the scale, Let It Sway’s lush mid-range pours out of the speakers on ‘Bended’ and ‘Letter Divine’, a richness and warmth, employed from Pershing onwards, to give singles like ‘Think I Wanna Die’, ‘Glue Girls’, ‘Banned (By The Man)’ and ‘Critical Drain’ their glamour and anthemic charm.

A few songs don’t really fit into either of these two categories and float innocuously between them: ‘Sweet Owl’ is the sort of tune I thought SSLYBY would never record, just because it’s so folksy, and ‘Yellow Missing Signs’ (the first song leaked from Tape Club) adopts an electro edge that makes you wonder what the band were up to when non-rock influences took hold in jamming sessions.

Diamonds in the rough tease themselves out, as is often the case with SSLYBY. Campfire ditty ‘Bigger Than Yr Yard’ could have made it onto Broom to close it with a late-night sing-a-long. Some of the newer, cleaner production stuff also grabs hold of you after a few listens: ‘New Day’ and ‘Coming Through’ are a class act placed by side by side. They’re probably my highlights of the album and shimmer with an innocent, harmonious glow. They're much like the flowering of confidence that seemed to resonate in Pershing: the realisation of the group's creative energy and pop prowess.

It's a great collection. There's no doubting that. I say it as a fan and as an advocate, but also because I think Tape Club shows quite clearly how enjoyable a band can be with a few chords running round their heads spontaneously knocked out on tape. Purveyors of lo-fi fun, nonsense and slivers of brilliance, SSLYBY are pop stalwarts.

Indie-blog praise hasn’t quite lived up to expectation: the objective 'standard' that artists are supposedly aiming for, but that is too crude. Even if ubiquity doesn't come calling, it doesn't need to, for many of us are just happy listening to SSLYBY….and occasionally writing about them.

Tape Club is in stores on 18^th October and comes in all sorts of formats (see here). The band are currently touring the States, as always. Fingers crossed for European dates. See above to stream the album.