A boom for pop

Papas Fritas's eight-track wonders

by Randee Dawn Cohen

Originally, "pop" was short for "popular." As in, massively, wildly, unconditionally accepted by the masses. These days, "pop" is making a comeback, being redefined as something that's hip in its simplicity, easily digested, and yet purer than heavily manufactured studio creations. So there's a mass of bands du jour jumping on the new-pop bandwagon. And then there's Papas Fritas, a Gloucester (Massachusetts) pop trio who, without following any trend, are nonetheless emerging among the leaders of the new-pop pack simply by following their own instincts. The sounds made by Tony Goddess, Keith Gendel, and Shivika Asthana are fashioned the way the Beatles, Brian Wilson, and even the Zombies once wrote songs -- as little eight-track wonders. This is, after all, a band who call their publishing company Pop Has Freed Us.

"It just feels to me that some bands are getting so far away from the music, as if you had to have some kind of big heavy recording-studio thing," says songwriter, pianist, vocalist, and guitarist Goddess over the phone from a photographer's studio in Cambridge. "This band has always been about us trying to present our music. That's all."

That straightforward simplicity first manifested itself when Goddess and Asthana were living in Delaware and writing and recording music as a what-the-hell hobby. Their 1995 debut, Papas Fritas (Minty Fresh), was a marvel of four-track demos -- sweet and simple, yet almost experimental, as if musical geniuses were holed up in a basement and had only children's toys with which to make music. For the follow-up, this year's Helioself (Minty Fresh), the tradition continues: songs like "Hey Hey You Say" are breathily perfect pop tunes that never take themselves too seriously. Goddess says, "That song was just us trying to get a rhythm of a rap song; we wanted to do this repetitious rhythm and do this chant over it. I don't even think it's really a song; it's just this kind of . . . rave."

And yet, striving for perfect pop doesn't mean taking out all the mistakes: the bouncy, melancholic "Say Goodbye" is sung slightly off-key by Asthana, and a piano flub has been left in. This is just three friends putting together songs that delight themselves, and the results glow. Goddess says they play around with the sounds they can get in the studio, even laying T-shirts over drums to achieve one sound. He adds that this kind of free experimenting is "not something you can do in an expensive studio. It costs too much. We tried a 16-track studio once, and it was a horrible experience. We were telling the producer to `try to make the guitar sound more like tinfoil,' and he had no idea what we were talking about."

Whatever they mean, the band manage to make it translate to CD in a clever, unselfconscious way that sticks in the brain. And the spirit of their music makes one believe that for Papas Fritas, "pop" may once again come to mean popularity. "The Beatles and the Beach Boys were really the last groups to appeal to all ages," says Goddess. "There's something special in their songs, where you get all age groups listening. Someone told us they sing `Hey Hey You Say' to their little baby, and the baby has heard it so much it's like a nursery rhyme. I like that."