Pas/Cal - I Was Raised on Matthew, Mark, Luke & Laura

Albums

Power-pop bands often resort to a bare-bones reduction of the pop formula – a pack of pretty-voiced boys repeating a good hook ad nauseum. Lyrics, with some recent exceptions, tend to get stranded in boy-loves-girl hell. Not Casimer Pascal, though, despite the fact that his band plays cheerful pop in the vein of the Raspberries and Rogue Wave. He wants to tell you stories.

To those ends, Pas/Cal's debut full-length album, I Was Raised on Matthew, Mark, Luke and Laura is packed with characters, each one distinctly different from the last. "Writing my novel on the train/I haven't wrote a god-damn thing in such a long, long time" laments a lovelorn college girl writing mash notes to her English professor in "Dearest Bernard Living." She writes, "Stumbling over 'Queen Mab' and 'Oh Chatterton, How Very Sad Was Thy Fate' But, not so when you'd speak. Oh those words were so everything. And they got me every time."

"We Made Our Way, We Amtrakked," is a literal trip. It has a banjo outro that would make Woody Guthrie proud, and it's narrated by a cynical dad nostalgic for his days on the road listening to David Bowie cassette tapes, while angering Filipinos and people who wear spray-gun painted t-shirts of their dead relatives.

Most of the longer pieces, as befitting epics, have distinct movements to them. The album also contains an actual suite ("Suite Cherry"), containing simpler, more cryptic lyrics than elsewhere on the album, more acoustic guitar, and retro vocal stylings, especially in "Cherry Tree," the middle movement – "Some like it up in the tree, don't they?" Pascal muses.

The last track, "Citizen's Army Uniform," ends strong, being both more electronic and more rhythmically complex than the rest of the album, and the off-the-wall lyrics are the best yet. Pascal veers toward social criticism in his indictment of a man who wears fashion like an army uniform – "You're dressed smart, with all your military garb and a cigar hanging from you moth like a strap-on…Pendleton flannels…Slacks from the Monkey Wards…and a three-button blazer."

I Was Raised on Matthew, Mark, Luke and Laura is power-pop for the literary crowd – a thoroughly civilized experiment.

Label: Le Grand Magistry, LLC
Release Date: 7-22-08

- Claire Shefchik