The early 2000s were a rough ride for Fastball, the retrophile power-pop trio from Austin, Texas. In a matter of months the group, comprised of Miles Zuniga (vocals, guitar, keys), Tony Scalzo (vocals, bass, guitar, keys) and Joey Shuffield (drums, percussion), went from toast of the town to very nearly toast.<\/p>\n
After scoring a pair of massive hits (The Way\u201d and \u201cOut Of My Head\u201d) off their 1998 sophomore album All The Pain Money Can Buy<\/i>, the threesome followed up with 2000\u2019s The Harsh Light Of Day<\/i>, an album that was stronger and deeper in nearly every respect\u2014and sold a fraction of its predecessor. Within months Hollywood Records dropped the band, leaving its future very much in question.<\/p>\n
It would be four years before Fastball\u2019s fourth album, the cheekily named Keep Your Wig On<\/i>, would be released by their new label Rykodisc. The bad news was, they were on a smaller label with a one-album deal. The good news was, they kept on making exactly the kind of music they wanted to make, that uniquely Fastball blend of hooky, melodic, British Invasion-influenced guitar rock with clever, frequently self-deprecating lyrics.<\/p>\n
\u201cShortwave\u201d makes for a characteristically quirky opener, a 1:13 overture-slash-homage to the early days of radio, featuring Zuniga and Scalzo harmonizing and guest Jeff Groves on sax. It segues directly into \u201cLou-ee Lou-ee,\u201d a prototypical Fastball single\u2014energetic, punchy and catchy as hell, complete with singalong chorus and terrific guitar hook. The most complicated thing about it is the title, a callback to the iconic early rock number \u201cLouie Louie\u201d; otherwise it\u2019s Power Pop 101: a toe-tapping rocker with vaguely angsty lyrics.<\/p>\n
Scalzo\u2019s \u201cDrifting Away\u201d is a cool concoction, a hybrid of two typical Fastball styles: it\u2019s a dreamy riff-rocker. The lyric about living with uncertainty in a relationship boils things down to this solid advice: \u201cListen to your heart \/ It’ll tell you where to go.\u201d They lean into the dreaminess on Zuniga\u2019s \u201cAirstream,\u201d an airy, slightly spacy tune about the freedom of life on the road (\u201cWhen it gets too familiar, I’ll be gone\u201d).<\/p>\n
Deploying another familiar frame, on \u201cI Get High\u201d they make a piano-based blues the foundation for a tune that morphs steadily from there, this time playing with your expectations by keeping a rein on the tempo most of the time but twice exploding into a sort of pre-chorus rave. In any case, it has a great vibe\u2014like a lot of the best Fastball songs. They\u2019re songs that feel like if you walked into a bar and they were playing, you’d stay and order a drink, even if you knew nothing about the band.<\/p>\n
Zuniga\u2019s \u201cPerfect World\u201d features firmly strummed acoustic rhythm guitar as he vents his frustrations with a partner who likes to complain (\u201cI know you think there’s a conspiracy to keep you down \/ It\u2019s all in your head \/ You gotta learn to tune it out\u201d). Scalzo takes the lead vocal on the heavier \u201cTill I Get It Right,\u201d punctuated by more honking sax from Groves, and then we\u2019re into the burnished opening riff of \u201cOur Misunderstanding.\u201d The latter features unison lead vocals over steady, strummy backing leading to a chorus melody that sticks like superglue on a tune about a relationship that\u2019s growing more distant by the day (\u201cYou\u2019re a stranger to me now\u201d).<\/p>\n
The final third of the album gets patchier. \u201cSomeday\u201d doesn\u2019t leave much of an impression, a White Album<\/i> pastiche without much meat on its bones. The playful, country-inflected \u201cMercenary Girl\u201d is a one-joke throwaway telegraphed by the title, though they have fun with it, and the pedal steel is a nice touch. \u201cFalling Upstairs\u201d is one of those moody, downbeat numbers that you typically find near the tail end of a Fastball album, albeit not one of their more memorable ones. \u201cRed Light,\u201d by contrast, is a hoot, a Ritchie Valens-ish matchup of early-rock stuttering back beat and mariachi horns, featuring a dynamic call-and-answer vocal arrangement.<\/p>\n
There are really only two surprising elements of this album. First is the number of Zuniga-Scalzo co-writes; before this, they had typically written more individually than together, but here six of the 10 cuts are collaborations between the band\u2019s two singer-songwriters. The second surprise is the production credits; six were co-produced by Mike McCarthy along with some combination of Zuniga and Scalzo, but Jeff Trott (Sheryl Crow) co-produced and played on \u201cOur Misunderstanding,\u201d \u201cSomeday\u201d and \u201cRed Light\u201d were produced by Adam Schlesinger (Fountains Of Wayne), and \u201cDrifting Away\u201d was co-produced by Scalzo and Rob Seidenberg. This is surprising because, despite this production-by-committee approach, the album feels seamless; the music is all of a piece and flows smoothly front to back.<\/p>\n
Keep Your Wig On<\/i> didn\u2019t set the world on fire\u2014it would be another five years before the band returned with Little White Lies<\/i> on Megaforce Records\u2014and it\u2019s not one of Fastball\u2019s best. But even a \u201cpretty good\u201d Fastball album amounts to musical comfort food for a power-pop aficionado, and the presence of standout tracks like \u201cLou-ee Lou-ee\u201d and \u201cI Get High\u201d makes this one well worth picking up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":35097,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[6028],"rating":[5615],"class_list":["post-46974","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-fastball","rating-rating-b"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46974","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46974"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46974\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=46974"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=46974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}