Sam Prekop
Who's Your New Professor
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Sam Prekop
Who's Your New Professor
Thrill Jockey, 2005
RiYL: Gastr Del Sol, Iron & Wine, Belle & Sebastian |
Well, who knows? People get older. Innovation becomes more and more difficult when you've got a whole mailing list that likes the current groove just fine. And, to be fair, a lot of Thrill Jockey's bands were kind of one-trick wonders. I have albums by Pullman, Freakwater, and Town & Country that I totally love and listen to all the time, but I've never felt in the least compelled to buy second albums by any of these groups. That was never true of Sam Prekop or his band The Sea & Cake until very recently.
The Sea & Cake's '90s records are great. The self-titled first one would have been a classic if it had stayed a one-off as originally planned; as it stands it's still delicious teatime music, pushed to the background only by the unflagging quality of the trilogy that succeeded it. The Biz (the rocking-est one), The Fawn (the electronic-est one), and especially Nassau (the wild, strummy, Feelies-partying-with Brasil '66 one) established a body of work with which only a couple of vastly more pretentious late-millennium indie acts (Pavement, Archers Of Loaf, Yo La Tengo) could compete.
While 2000's Oui was initially welcomed by many as a return to the more organic side of the band after the ProTools-y The Fawn, as it turned out it was the beginning of a second, far less satisfying era for the band: an album every couple of years with every slightest hint of a new idea burnished clean off, and a tour assuming everyone's schedule wasn't cluttered with gallery openings. 2003's One Bedroom is essentially Oui except with a Bowie cover. Yeah, it's a good Bowie cover. But once they could do so much more!
In retrospect the beginning of the end for TSAC as Great American Rock Band came in 1999 with the release of frontperson Sam Prekop's first solo album, efficiently titled Sam Prekop. It sounded like music for a Tylenol commercial, and lo, it became so. A crossover success among the circles of people who thought And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out was Yo La Tengo's debut album (and pushed their concert ticket prices out of the range of comfort for real music fans like you and I), there's nothing objectionable about it. It was and is fabulous makeout music. But like those aforementioned records by "concept" bands like Pullman, the soft bossa nova vibe of Prekop was a creative cul-de-sac. It would be impossible to make another album under the same name with the same group of musicians without it sounding exactly the same.
So (500 words in) we arrive at Who's Your New Professor. It's quite lovely; had it but come first I would be glad to call it the better of the two records. It's mildly more electro than its predecessor due no doubt to the presence of McEntire rather than Jim O'Rourke in the producer's chair.
"C+F" has a demonstrative guitar riff that gives way to a sweet, delicate instrumental fadeout with restrained coverage from Rob Mazurek on cornet. "Two Dedications" is sort of like a hip-hop remix of a One Bedroom track that suddenly gives way to strumming acoustic guitars for the last few seconds for new particular reason. The brief sketch "Neighbor To Neighbor" has a sophisticated but catchy little melody that Burt Bacharach would appreciate. Still there's no earthly way that anyone in good conscience can recommend this record to anyone who owns any of Prekop's previous work already. It's just too much of the same thing. Even the lyrics (when audible) seem vaguely familiar.
Prekop has come a long way from the days of Shrimp Boat, whose recent multi-disc retrospective Something Grand essayed a talent that while not always consistent (indeed, frequently annoying) would seldom rest on the laurels of earlier accomplishment. He's passed all too quickly from Shrimp Boat's awkward adolescence through The Sea & Cake's fully realized maturity into lukewarm middle age. It's not like it's all over -- indeed, longtime colleague Archer Prewitt, who provides the second guitar on this record, continues constant improvement in his own solo work -- but until told otherwise, you can cancel your Thrill Jockey subscription.
MARK T.R. DONOHUE | Mark T.R. Donohue is a prolific freelance writer whose areas of expertise include Rockies baseball, video games, genre television, English soccer, and pub rock. He lives in Colorado, where he cultivates the largest and creepiest private collection of Alyson Hannigan memorabilia in the Mountain West.