Sock it to me! No, you bet your sweet bippy I’m not an extra on the sixties’ too-weird-for-words variety show Laugh-In; I’m just quoting the title of one-woman army Colleen Green’s latest LP. With guitar and drum machine Green writes songs she calls “stoner pop,” and they’re all over the place: she usually sings in a deliciously hushed voice, but not always, and her songs veer from the sweet to the swaggering, with a touch of The Ramones here and some muted synth-pop there, and the important thing to note about all of them is they’re catchy as Kuru.
Her sophomore release, 2012’s Milo Goes to Compton, is an obvious nod to the Descendents’ 1982 LP Milo Goes to College, and reflects her move to Cali from Massachusetts. It follows 2011 debut Cujo, which includes a song called “Mike” I’d like to think she wrote about me but didn’t. (Or at least I think she didn’t. Plenty of women have written songs about me, but most of the titles can’t be repeated in a family magazine like The Vinyl District.) It also includes a hard-rocking (she can do amazing things with that guitar) tune called “Rabid Love,” which I would also like to think is about me, but I think is about a raccoon. (I haven’t listened carefully to the lyrics.) And her newest offering, 2013’s Sock It To Me, includes such great grinding tunes as “Heavy Shit” and the slow and ominous title track, on which she plays some space rock keyboards and sings until there’s a kind of hush all over the world, and it’s emanating from your turntable.
I’m no big fan of drum machines, but they work in Green’s case because there’s something mysteriously mechanized about her vocals as well. She has a lovely voice, but her vocals are cold—not Nico cold, mind you, or even close—but cold nonetheless, and if that sounds like an insult it’s not. Even on such love songs as “Only One” she sounds like the coolest girl in your high school, the impossibly prepossessed one who never lost her cool, or her sense of impressive self-possession.
Even on Milo Goes to Compton’s most controversial track, “I Wanna Be Degraded,” she keeps her cool. An obvious nod to the Ramones—or more accurately, a blatant rip of said band—it features a pedal-to-the-metal riff and lyrics about people (including the “I” in the song) who want to be degraded sexually, and it’s one very catchy if ambiguous song. Is it solely a recognition of a world in which people get their sex kicks in million wonderful ways, or something more? I’m inclined to take it at face value; it doesn’t appear to be a feminist statement, but more of a statement of fact, the fact being, “This is how some people get off, and it’s alright with me.”
In any event it’s followed by the great “Goldmine,” a propulsive pop tune with a heavy beat, one primal guitar riff, and a big organ, to say nothing of a melody every bit as delicious as being spit on, if that’s your idea of erotic ambrosia. The organ plays a great figure, Green’s vocals are hushed, and it breaks my heart every time Green ends it by repeating, “I need you.” Meanwhile, “I Will Follow Him” is a great drone of a song that builds and builds, until Green plays some cool VU-school guitar and sings (as loudly as she ever does), “Anywhere, I will follow” over and over again.
“Always on My Mind” opens with that drum machine and a bass and continues in that vein for 40 seconds or so, when a really cool keyboard riff comes in and Green does some magical things with her guitar. Her vocals are trademark refrigerated but nice, and followed by a long bass riff before that neat keyboard figure returns. This one is pure atmospherics, and is over before you know it, while “Nice Boy (I Want One)” is more chipper, and features an elevated heartbeat of a drum machine and lots of cool dissonant guitar. Green wants a nice boy to “spend some quiet time,” and she repeats “I want/I want/I want” and even almost loses her hushed cool before she returns to singing, “I want a nice boy/To spend some quiet time” as the volume increases, her guitar goes chukka-chukka-chukka, and the song ends.
“Worship You” is a great tune, opening with that drum machine before the song establishes one very radical groove thanks to her guitar, while her vocals are all over the place, from ‘60s chic to points unknown. She wants to worhip her love and she wants to be worshipped in return. Her vocals are perfect, the groove is one in a million, and it constitutes the perfect lead-in to the pummeling slow crawl of “The Day I Fell in Love With You,” which boasts some big barbaric power chords and sounds less like a love song than a eulogy. As for her cover of The Descendents’ “Good Good Things,” it’s full of empty space; Green uses only a rudimentary guitar riff to fill the vacuum as she sings “Tell me I’m your girl,” “put your arms around me” and other mundane lyrics characteristic of love songs, which are the hardest songs to write nowadays because Barry Manilow (as he notes in “I Write All the Songs”) wrote so many of them, and used up all the good lyrics as well as all the good hooks.
Colleen Green is somebody to keep your eye on; she has a vision and she’s following it wherever it leads her. Myself, I can’t wait until she comes to my town, and I can check out her wonderfully minimalistic shtick for myself. In the meantime, I will continue to let her sock it to me, until I have two black eyes and a swollen lip and a loose tooth because that’s how much I love her music. I wanna be degraded, especially by a woman so self-effacing (yet so confident) that the cover of her latest LP shows her from the rear in the aisle of a supermarket, wearing a hoodie with the words “Sock It To Me” on its back. She’s not selling her looks, she’s selling her music, and there’s something to be said for that in a world where a female artist is all too often adjudged to be only as good as her glossies. Sock it to me, Colleen!
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
