From The Record Shelf: Useful Music (No, really!)

If someone has browsed through the pages of this young blog for middle-aged readers, it seems obvious: Only old music for older folks here. But one goal of One Buck Records is to also from time to time present albums that have fallen through the cracks or have never gotten the attention they deserve. And yes, that includes albums that are less than forty years old. Case in point: Useful Music by the Josh Joplin Group. These were indeed my college years, so it's fitting that at the time I would listen to what in the olden days was called 'college rock'. It is in many ways is a good snapshot of what smart, well-written and played college rock sounded like in the early Aughts. Most of it was actually recorded and released in 1999, though this is the re-release from 2001 that added "Camera One" which dutifully became the album's lone sort-of hit. But Useful Music has held up remarkably well and even the markers of its time of production - the slight Hip Hop-like rythm of "Superstar", the reference to Sugar Ray in "Phil Ochs" - are now a charming time capsule. This album sounds like its time, while also subtly commenting on it. Take  "Phil Ochs", clearly one of the highlights of the set, a song that's not so much a eulogy for the beloved songwriter himself but rather the values he stood for, all the while skewering the rise of the artificial teen/boy group pop stars of the late 1990s: "And though the poster child tries/ he won't survive the scorn/ he is killed with compromise / in the tube where he was born / Phil, you are not gone / 50 fans can't be wrong / or can they?". 

The melancholy underpinning "Phil Och" also hints at what really makes this record. On one hand its fabulously catchy stuff - great music to listen and hum or sing to while doing something else - drivng, obviously, but also the laundry or what have you.  But then the record sneaks up on you with a well-placed observation or turn of phrase, or a tinge of melancholy during the mostly upbeat-sounding proceedings. Sometimes it's more than a tinge, as in the aforementioned "Camera One" that cuts through the beautiful L.A. lifestyle facade to reveal the story of a Hollywood suicide. And yet, you can easily not notice the often surprisingly weighty lyrics, because there are these fantastically catchy melodies propping up the songs, having you sing along to their choruses in no time. Useful music, indeed.