Love stories

Imperial Teen's new-wave blues

by Franklin Soults

Imperial Teen's 1996 debut album, Seasick (Slash/London), had no right to be as great as it was. To borrow a recent slur from über-critic Sarah Vowell, it was "hopelessly new wave." That means not that it was retro -- which can still fly as a fashion statement, if nothing else -- but that it was old guard. Two back-up girls (Lynn Perko and Jone Stebbins) hammered out foursquare 4/4 beats, thumpa-thumpa bass lines, and "da da da'' choruses behind two indistinguishable lead guys (Will Schwartz and Faith No More's Roddy Bottum) who traded vocals and guitar parts that sounded not just thin but skinny.

Like so many stalwart small-time acts of the pre-digital age, Imperial Teen pegged almost everything on their hooks -- their harmony-backed tunes and mid-to-fast tempos. The strategy couldn't have sounded quainter and more dated if it had been Joe Jackson's first album or Buddy Holly's last. The thing was, Imperial Teen's hooks not only caught, they cut. It wasn't just the barbs hidden in their words, but the way they delivered them. Where Joe Jackson's cloddish delivery served the cause of geekdom and Buddy Holly's inscrutable bonhomie served his own mythos, Schwartz and Bottum served their personal psychological exigencies by investing an emotional intensity in their simple singing that signified even when the exact object of their anguish was too metaphorical to pin down. If they begged some old-school comparison, it wasn't to Jackson or Holly but to the enigmatic wordslinger and acerbic tunesmith who used to draw comparisons to Jackson and Holly with just about every review, the young Elvis Costello. Come to think of it, the rinky-dink pub rock of My Aim Is True had no right to be as great as it was, either.

If that piques your interest, well, the differences between the two albums are at least as important as the similarities. Whereas My Aim Is True became an instant touchstone for the entire electrifying cultural moment that was the year two sevens clashed (that would be 1977, remember?), Seasick never amounted to anything more than a high-rotation fix for a spidery nation of rock critics and assorted other would-be urban bohemian sophisticates. You could put part of that down to how bracing and brash My Aim Is True sounded in its day compared to the outmoded Seasick.

But it's also true that Elvis's venom was instantly legible to the culture at large, whereas Imperial Teen's was just too sophisticated and bohemian for easy digest, a combination that for once spelled exactly what generations of ignorant bigots have always claimed -- it was just too gay. Elvis's source of resentment was, first, second, and third, girls, girls, girls -- a hallowed rock-and-roll tradition that new wave did little to upset. On Seasick, Imperial Teen made clear in numbers like "Butch," "Blaming the Baby" and "You're One" that the passion of these boys was other boys, and their theme was the trials and ecstasies of growing up knowing it. Maybe this theme was sublimated much of the time, but as they put it, "Our subtext is our plot," so it not only informed their expressionistic alienation, it gave it force, direction . . . you know -- meaning.

In the second month of a year in which two nines merge, consolidate, globalize, marginalize, fragment, downsize, anything-but-clash (that would be "partisan," don't forget), Imperial Teen have returned to try to escape their identity via the impossible trick of honing their edge while removing its point. Delayed for the proverbial "reasons beyond our control," What Is Not To Love (Slash) musses up the forever perfect sound of Seasick with two seven-minute rave-ups that do little more than jog in place, and it dives into gender confusion and sexual ambiguity with lyrics that slip away from the enigmatic into the utterly confounding.

Opening up with a baffling couplet rhyming "Victorian" with "Picture of Dorian," Imperial Teen do no more than wink at über-critic Evelyn McDonnel's assessment that nominal lead man Roddy Bottum is "sort of the Oscar Wilde of alt-rock": an earnest and enraged romantic who perforce tries to escape the damning confines of society through the Olympian exertion of his acrobatic wit. For Wilde, that was an unimpeachable survival strategy -- not to mention a source of astounding inspiration. For Imperial Teen, it's just part of the cultural imperative of indie inscrutability über alles.

It's a testament to the force of the band's hearty hybrid sound that much of the new stuff retains the shape and force of Seasick's best numbers. Don't like Elvis Costello? How 'bout the Pixies? ("The Beginning.") New Order? ("Birthday Girl.") Billy Idol's "White Wedding"? ("Year of the Tan."). After three years of delay, that's just enough to sate one's appetite -- and whet it again, too. Imperial Teen may have escaped the plot of their subtext, but a rose by any other name still pricks as deep.