The Faraway Places
Out West
Get here, and they’ll do the rest
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 Tracing the patterns of “influence” ––
better described as confluence –– is a fun game to play when it comes to
your fave pop groups. It’s also
a bit dodgy, because touchstones are often not so obviously placed, and the obscure ones
remain tucked within the brains of the creators, obvious to them but hidden
to the rest of us.
I was excited to get the new disc from the Faraway
Places, Out of the Rain, the Thunder & the Lightning (Save It Records), because the proclaimed impact
of German experimental gods Can on their previous album,
Unfocus
On It, from 2003, turned out — for once
— to have been entirely justifiable. They did a good job of defining what
they have now gone further to term a “West Coast Krautrock sound.” Out
of the Rain is somewhat like its
predecessor, a warm-sounding record full of well-constructed pop/rock songs
whose raggedy melodic patches and insistent hooks that sound crafted yet
stumbled upon grab you; these great pop things just as often fall into a
sort of daydream-coma mode in the middle or at song’s end. And that there
might be pinpointed as the principal Can “influence.”
Chris Colthart is the brains behind the Faraway
Places. He lives in Eagle Rock, as do most of his band partners. Colthart
has given the impression in recent times of having been out of the scene
for a while, yet he’s mainly been holed up trying to finish this record,
while trying out different formations and musical contexts — power pop
versus sound art — of his band.
There was a good amount of agonizing behind the
album’s creation, according to Colthart. “I would just work on it
intensely, and then get kind of freaked out by it and take time off, and
then reapproach it,” he says. “Then there was a little bit of just coming
to terms with the transition of, like, being in a band was something I did
after college or whatever to I still want to make music but I’m an adult
now, and I’m having to put things together for real, just making an early
midlife transition. [Laughs] Even though I’m not middle-aged.”
Making the new record found Colthart joined by
his primary musical partner Donna Coppola and a few others from the pair’s
old smart-pop band Papas Fritas and local pop progressives Bedroom Walls.
Colthart did the bulk of the engineering work himself, recording in bits
and pieces in his little home studio, and being “just way too perfectionist
about the whole thing,” he frets. “I recorded it all myself, and mixed it
with some friends. I’ve just been going Kevin Shields over the whole thing,
you know?”
The
prolonged effort was worth the wait, going by the fine craft of the
songwriting that characterizes the album’s 10 tracks, and by the amount of
shrewdly scuzzed-up, analog-board-twiddled sonic detail that lures you back
again and again to the tunes’ mysteries. And that’s a sonic detail that
doesn’t hurt to hear, unlike so many picture-perfect digital recordings of
current vintage. Songs like “The Sun Goes West,” “You Can Cry” and “Just
Let Go” evoke the very best massagingly rounded-edge power of great ’60s or
early ’70s albums like the more jazzy-improv-psych late-Byrds stuff, or,
more specifically, Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush or, in fact, Boston’s
eponymous debut disc.
Colthart has a lot of
severely avanty musical/art interests that he’s in the process of
reconciling — or not reconciling — with his rock-band career, for example,
doing way modal psychedelic guitar stuff (“going Pharoah Sanders on it”)
with his Myrtle Energy Music Configuration at Machine Project, or his
large-group experiments at places like Sea and Space Explorations in Eagle
Rock, “where it’s all acoustic guitars and clarinets and bells and chimes
and bird noises, and the band surrounding the audience and playing this
sort of chiming, Alice Coltrane/Philip Glass/Steve Reich–type of deal.” But
he is plagued by a kind of, well, guilt about it.
“I get going into something like that,” he says
with a laugh, “then I say, ‘No, wait, I gotta get the rock band going
again!’ But I really see it as all part of the same band. The band in one
case is 20 people, whereas now we’re playing with six people. And then for
a while also I was doing the rock band as a 14-piece orchestra, like Sun
Ra–style. I went through that period and then — y’know, six people is
enough; you can definitely make a wall of sound.”
So
though he’ll continue to tinker with the formal/textural approach of his
band’s sounds — he’s planning a freeform psychedelic EP for summer —
Colthart has decided, somewhat shakily yet resolutely enough, that one can
get profoundly progressive things said in the context of a small beat combo
that frugs out short, catchy songs.
“Yeah,
I’m really interested in Can,” he says with a shrug, “and I’m really
interested in good power pop, too. Whenever I get really into one, pretty
soon, I start getting called over to the other.” He laughs. “I think,
‘There’s something so great about the perfect pop song. Why am I screwing
around with these sound collages?’” 
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