Portastatic - Bright Ideas

Genre rock Publisher Merge External Links Official Website Merge

Bright Ideas is the latest audio journal entry from the one-man cottage industry that is Mac McCaughan. In addition to helming Merge Records with the ex, Laura Ballance, and fronting Superchunk, McCaughan has amazingly found the time to create challenging and intensely personal music with Portastatic. Amazingly enough, none of Portastatic's albums and EPs, of which Bright Ideas is the eighth, bears the stale whiff of the side project. The 2000 EP De Mel De Melao even managed to make Brazilian-tinged indie sound fresh in a year besieged by Beck-engendered, Os Mutantes-reissue-fueled Tropicalia mania.

The new full-length album finds Portastatic on familiar indie terrain. The band does explore alt-country on "Little Fern" and - here's where the strings come in - Genevieve Gagon's violin has a strangely calming effect. Superchunk's secret weapon has always been McCaughan's voice; no matter how vitriolic the lyrics, his sweet North Carolina whine has saved the music from drowning in spite. This holds true for Bright Ideas. Unfortunately, McCaughan tends to sing in the upper register, which sometimes makes the songs indistinguishable from one another. The thoughtful "Registered Ghost" is one of the exceptions that proves the rule; McCaughan's voice seems weighted down with rue, making the song even more resonant. The album's closer, "Full of Stars," is a sweet, gentle lullaby that indicates a definite maturing of McCaughan's musical sensibilities. The McCaughan of "Package Thief" and "Slack Motherfucker" seems a million years gone, replaced by a man who realizes that, like music, life has more than three chords. Bright Ideas encapsulates that sentiment perfectly.