Entertainment :: Music
Airshow by Myke Weiskopf
EDGE ContributorThursday Jun 15, 2006 Although he masquerades behind a tedious university appointment by day, Clayton Scoble is secretly one of Boston’s most prodigiously gifted songwriters, a purveyor of delicious pop melodies played from inexplicable angles, whose approach to a song involves sneaking up from behind it and dragging it, backwards and blindfolded, through a thorny melodic labyrinth. (This is a good thing.) Put in rock-geek terms, Scoble is the rare and genuine heir to a highly selective lineage that includes such whispered names as Scott Miller (Game Theory/Loud Family), Alex Chilton (Big Star), and (perhaps) the pre-Diana Krall-era Elvis Costello. Scoble spikes the punch with evocative but sense-scrabbling lyrics which suggest more than they actually mean; he shares Richard Buckner’s ability to write compelling words which keep clarity at a telescope’s distance, but which nonetheless still carry an intuitive emotional weight.
Francine has been the vehicle for Scoble’s quizzical and catchy-as-hell music since 1997, when he assembled the group via a handful of home demos circulated after the demise of his prior group, Poundcake. The freshly-minted quartet issued the Pop Warner EP, a tentative shot across the bough that was immediately trumped by a brilliant full-length debut, 1998’s Forty on a Fall Day. As Francine raked in the accolades following Forty’s release, Scoble sat in on several of Aimee Mann’s albums and drafted local pop mastermind John Dragonetti (aka Jack Drag) to produce and arrange Francine’s second disc, the moonlit 28 Plastic Blue Versions of Endings Without You. Whereas Forty on a Fall Day received mass acclaim for its guitar-heavy, quintessentially Bostonian garage-rock sound, Plastic Blue generously ladled Dragonetti’s synth-and-loop soup over a more reflective brace of songs.
Clearly not one to rush back into a good thing, Francine took three more years to fully realize Airshow, their third and newest album. One might call it, with varying degrees of praise and/or accusation, a more mature sound: continuing to evolve away from their early pop explosiveness, Francine demonstrates a more surefooted and organic use of studio embellishments. Stood inaugurates the album on an ominous note, a descending spiral-staircase melody suspended in a processed organ drone which hovers like an unwelcome ghost beneath the lyrics’ ten uncertain lines. Zeros and Ones restores the emotional balance, rocking gently like a hand-crafted Fleetwood Mac hammock held aloft by autumnal bossanova guitar chords and creamy electric piano. Airshow continues down this beautifully ornamented path, catching synthpop pulses in its butterfly net on Day Sucker, blasts of Beach Boy harmony on Here Comes, subliminal smears of field recording and short-circuiting organ on Storrow Drivers, and countless other thoughtfully-deployed details. Listeners with a short attention span will likely find themselves drifting about two-thirds of the way through this resolutely mid-tempo collection, but insomniacs predisposed to late-night headphone reveries will want to stick it out for the sleep-encrusted coda of Beatrice, which ushers Airshow through the closing credits like a gorgeous, Vaseline-smeared sunrise in reverse.
Francine’s early electricity may be a memory, at least on record, but it’s been supplanted by a depth that the more immediately gratifying air-guitar rock of their early single Trampoline could hardly have predicted. Scoble and companions may continue to languish under whatever cruel radar separates the full-timers from the weekend warriors, but Airshow is decisive proof that humankind offers better and more noble things than our base daily occupations may reveal. Let the pink slips start here.
by Francine
Q Division 1035
Myke Weiskopf (www.mykeweiskopf.com) is a writer and composer based in Somerville, MA.
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