(100) Days of Soundtrack: #5 – Cool For August – Grand World
Part of the reason I wanted to open the floor to my fine friends to suggest music is because they know things I don’t. Of course! How dull if we only all knew “Uptown Funk,” but had nothing in our back pockets to share! Difference can be bad, like when someone doesn’t understand why the “Nickelback” card exists in Cards Against Humanity, but it can also push us out of our comfort zones or remind us of things we did not remember.
The corollary to this logic is this: I have a backlog of CDs I’ve bought for a buck here, two bucks there, from all manner of the General 90s Mishmash of half-hit-wonders, and without other people holding me back from the ledge, I would probably end up headlong into the dustbin of Alt-Rock Radio. Today is about as half-hit as you can get: a one-album band with two radio songs that both made almost zero impact. Brace yourself, kids. It’s gonna be a good one.
Of course, back in ’97, I’d never have even wanted to spin Cool For August’s Grand World. The first single, “Don’t Wanna Be Here,” was off-putting at the time. Gordon Vaughn, allegedly the lead singer, has a deeply unsteady voice. It has vibrato to the point of comic relief, and coupled with the falsetto of the chorus, I was not quite ready to accept the band as music. As time went on, however, the song was just distinctive enough to fester in my mind, and when I had had enough, I realized, hell, I actually like what it has to offer. There’s something comfortable but just weird enough, something oddly catchy. I bought Grand World a long time ago on that merit, as well as a vague memory of “Trials,” the second single. It just seems like it’s damn near time to hear the rest of the album.
If ELO are inherently a 70s band, Cool For August was inherently a 90s band. This is what 90s music sounded like. It’s quintessentially of that era. To my ear, that’s a more earnest sound, more honest, than the 70s sounds like, but then again, that’s where I was bred, so I’m sure I’m biased. Bias or no, though, this is an album that makes sense next to a Toad the Wet Sprocket or Live album. The elements that made “Don’t Wanna Be Here” seem so odd at first, and so intriguing later on, are heavily muted throughout the rest of the album. That vibrato can’t be buried, but the songs are all just good standard rock songs. It’s an album where I want to go back and listen again, because it’s solid stuff, but it’s also an album I think I’m going to need to go back to, because it flowed through my ears and out again, and left me with nothing. Nothing except a sense that I appreciated it, that I was not wrong to spend money on this item. It felt nice as a whole, but its separate parts remain a mystery even after a listen. I recall feeling more OK than normal about “Sylmar” and “On & On”, and the intro to “Wheels” made my ears very happy, but overall, it was just an album I’m happy to have heard once and for all. It’s something that would fit wonderfully in a playlist, but maybe not anything one would seek out individual tracks outside of those singles. Some bands only have one standout song in them. It’s nice when this does not prevent them from at least churning out a set that is not regrettable.
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