Simply Put, Guster Works Magic Stressing the Light-Hearted

Don't be fooled by Boston band Guster's song titled "Simple Machine". There's precious little simple about it. As cosmic soups go this one doesn't sit in your stomach too heavily. As a matter of fact "Simple Machine" possesses the quirkiness of several tunes from The Cars, an old school Boston group. As was true for their predecessors in Boston-based tune making, Guster winks at you as if to communicate, "Yeah, we're not taking ourselves too seriously either." If you miss the '80s in all their keytar new wave goodness then "Simple Machine" is made to order. Anchoring the track you'll notice a drum set to metronome like precision timing. It isn't until much later that the aesthetic changes to where programmed drums hand the floor over to a tropical island thump that tells us the guys aren't resting on their alt-rock laurels. No shortage of bounciness allows the song to mold itself into an ideal fit for what co-lead vocalists Adam Gardner and Ryan Miller are sharing with us. Speak of the word game time to open up the hood and see what constitutes the engine within. Upfront I can assure you Adam and Ryan measure their poetry, thus allowing us space to inhale it as deeply as possible. "Static, steady, plastic, motion." Kind of random dictionary talk like "Mouthwash, jukebox, gasoline", three words lifted from Beck's "Devil's Haircut". Not unlike Beck I'm getting a pretty fair impression these mad geniuses know exactly what they're about and why they're about it. To continue we next hear "Lights flash, beating, almost, breathing." In each case the words tap dance hand in hand with the keyboards Adam's applying. You weren't expecting a grade school vocabulary lesson set to an impishly cute rhythm but sometimes the unexpected becomes reality in all its warped glory. Adam's voice intimates he's not voyaging to any one spot in particular. Wherever he winds up, he's pleased as punch to make it there. "Simple Machine" revels in its oddball status which allows us to rise to the same level of raw pleasure it's already arrived at. Amid the many scattered supposedly unconnected vocabulary words, Adam bares his soul in confessing he'll never find his way back home. So are we to surmise the random word speak amounts to bread crumbs that have been eaten by pigeons as soon as he's laid them on the ground in hopes of finding his way out of the underbrush should he become entangled unwittingly? Could be. That's a Guster secret I imagine. Separate from dashed off nouns and not at all boring to put under the microscope arises one uniquely spun line in particular. We're used to hearing defiant contemporaries sure of their footing convey "I will get by on my own." In Guster's realm that's been jiggered to read as: "So just forget about me. I will get by on myself." Were they trying to flip flop "on" and "by" as a dyslexic does as a matter of the condition he or she suffers from? Maybe not but the speculation game alone is worth the trouble of asking. Blink and you'll miss the piano support Ryan adds to the mix. There does come a point where we wonder how much paint thinner this foursome has been ingesting. Need proof? How about "Wise up, scarecrow, this is treason." Mumbling of someone not too dissimilar to the wacky head trippers who mumble their way home on the city bus. You want to know who the kook's talking to but not so much that you want to meet the business end of his knife blade. "Simple Machine" gets the job done on the adrenaline pumped from percussion, keys, and voice box working together to gift us with the sum of its parts plus something extra for us to remember the sojourn on the ride home.