The Slats, Boom Patrol

The other day I was driving through downtown St. Paul, trying to familiarize myself with the area considering that it's now a virtual certainty that I'm moving to the Twin Cities in the near future (didn't get into Harvard, didn't get funding at UC-Berkeley, decided that I'd sleep better at night actively working to improve the future than digging into the past anyway), listening to 770 AM, "Radio K", the UMN student radio station.

Eventually, after some crappo jug band, I stumbled upon something pretty damn awesome. The song I heard was not identified until some minutes later, after I had pulled into the parking lot of a conveniently-placed Cheapo Records location to wait for it.

The lyric was seemingly written by someone unfamiliar with the idea of the cellular telephone, not to mention the lesson of Tommy Tutone's "867-5309/Jenny" (that is, don't put real telephone numbers in your songs -- in this case it's 319-1234); together with the production, stylisms, and a certain amateurishness of musicianship it all pointed to a long-lost one-shot single of early-80s vintage (it probably also helped that it was served up with a light dusting of AM-band static). I wrote down the song title ("Call My Telephone", which I honestly should have figured out on my own) and the name of the band (the Slats) whilst bracing myself for a years-long wild goose chase. I figured if all else failed I could ask my aunt if she had heard of them - she has the Young Canadians album No Escape (featuring the classic "Hawaii"), which is of a piece, stylistically, with this.

The Radio K DJ said that the band was local-ish, so I started in the "Local" section, and damn if there weren't three copies. Fuck if it didn't come out in 2006.

Trances of the Young Canadians' album are in evidence all over this one: there are more related song titles than chance would seem to allow (for instance, the Young Canadian's "Automan" is here replaced by "Ironman", "Hawaii" goes to "King of Hawaii", "Data Redux" is "I Wrote The Code"; another swell TCs connection is Vancouver's Young Canadians' having written a song entitled "I Hate Music" at virtually the same time as the Replacements).

Once I actually got into the album beyond just "Call My Telephone" and the tracklisting, I found that while the Slats are very very good at their simulacrum of early-80s power pop, they aren't just slavish imitators. And that would have been fine. That stuff is a son of a bitch to track down. The Slats do just enough that if their album gets dropped through a time warp into 1979, it's blowing some fucking minds, man.

Sometimes that doesn't work out too well. "Ignatius", for instance, comes off like an outtake from License to Ill-era Beastie Boys. In general, though, the drummer knows when to get off of the historical-reconstruction high horse and drop some modern post-hardcore/indie rock beats, which means that many of these songs work better than they would have as just straight power-pop songs. It also meshes much better with the Slats' guitarist's tendency to throw in dissonant squawks and off-time digressions, but ironically, probably strengthens the case of anybody out there who feels the inclination to trick their friends into thinking that this album is 27 years old, tragically ignored for its out-there vision.