The Submarines
If you only listen to one song today, make it "Birds" by The Submarines (2011, from the album
Love Notes/Letter Bombs).
The Submarines are an indie-pop band from Los Angeles who have released three albums since 2006. The core of the band is the husband-and-wife duo of John Dragonetti and Blake Hazard. They met in Boston, where they started dating and playing in a band together. They moved to Los Angeles and broke off their romantic relationship, but continued to work together. After a while, they resumed their romance and eventually got married.
If I'm honest, I had never heard of The Submarines until I found their remarkable Daytrotter session in December of last year. I liked what I heard, but for some reason, I waited a few weeks before I downloaded the album. If I had gotten it before the new year, it probably would have found its way onto my favorite 22 non-Canadian albums of 2012.
Just to offer a couple of bits of background, Blake Hazard is a Vermonster and is the great-granddaughter of the great American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. She also has movie star good looks. While a pretty face certainly helps, it takes much more than that to make me like the music. Thanks to the way Daytrotter does their portraiture, I only had the ever so vague notion of what they looked like when I first heard them. I had no idea how pretty she is until a few weeks after that. The point is that her good looks have nothing to do with the way I feel about the music. I think a lot of people unfortunately grant free passes to pretty people. Zooey Deschanel is a great example of this. She's very pretty, and only marginally talented. She's a mediocre actress who gets more roles than she deserves. That's nothing compared to her bogus music career. I can't stand She & Him because I hate the way she sings. People buy their records because (A) they're so incredibly hip, and (2) she's pretty. If the "she" in She & Him was some unknown, plain girl who sings the way Zooey sings, nobody would care. Be honest with yourselves. She's not that good. It's just that the suit fits. Remember Johnny Bravo? Same thing. End of rant.
I'm not sure who to compare The Submarines to. It's hard to avoid comparing them to other husband-and-wife indie duos in which the woman is a blonde and the man is a brunet. Mates of State, The Rosebuds, … Okay, there's two anyway. Then again, I can name a million indie brunet husband and blonde wife duos who don't sound a thing like The Submarines. Dean & Britta. Okay, there's one. All tomfoolery aside, though, they do sound reasonably enough like both Mates of State and The Rosebuds.
I don't have either of the two Submarines records that came before this one, so in all of this, Love Notes/Letter Bombs is my only frame of reference.
I've read that the album is about the complexities and difficulties that marriage presents. Today's song, though, is about forgetting the hard parts and just letting loose. Yeah, you could worry about when this good thing is going to end. Or you could just go with it.
It's not so easy feeling everything
We were so ready for the fall
If we could only surrender let it in
We'd never have to ask what we were missing
Oh no oh no don't go
I want to take you home tonight
Our love our love our love
Hey what if everything's all right
Indeed. What if everything's all right? What if there's not a storm cloud looming?
Although The Submarines employ a lot of xylophone on other songs, I'm sad to say that there's almost none on this song. If I could remix the song, I'd put a bunch of xylophone instead of piano in the bit from 1:03 to 1:26. It's already a fun, bouncy song. It would be even more so with the xylophone. That's just my opinion, and you all know how I feel about tuned percussion.
I like the "Strawberry Fields"-type backwards drum tape at 1:30. And again at 2:52, followed by backwards looped guitar tape. I like that in the choruses, Blake has like three vocal tracks. In a more general way, I just like the feel of the song. It's bouncy.
Order Love Notes/Letter Bombs through the Nettwerk Records/Amazon store here.
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