Globe Columnist
JOPLIN, Mo. —
The Blue Shadows:“On the Floor of Heaven”
Rating:B
The 2010 re-issue of the commercially unsuccessful 1993 country album “On the Floor of Heaven” by The Blue Shadows has grown into one of the more enjoyable discoveries I’ve made this summer.
The Canadian band was fronted by Billy Cowsill, who was the lead singer and guitarist of the cheesy ‘60s family band the Cowsills, but by the time he formed The Blue Shadows, he could alternately conjure Roy Orbison, The Flying Burrito Brothers or, in his harmonies with co-founder Jeffrey Hatcher, the Everly Brothers.
Many of the songs are bathed in pedal-steel guitar, and if you came to the album without any context, it’d be difficult to place it in time. That timelessness is the album’s most charming quality and also its one significant weakness.
“On the Floor of Heaven” sounds like a lost classic because it does such a fine job evoking the hallmarks of its forbearers, but ultimately it runs a little too long -- each song achieves some degree of loveliness while still failing to establish its own personality.
In 1993, I’m certain The Blue Shadows sounded fresh for want of anything else like it at the time -- and they still sound fresh today -- but while The Blue Shadows are gifted at conjuring the sweep of pop-country’s history, they don’t distinguish themselves within it.
Of course, saying a band sounds great without being legendary is a trifle complaint. There are some hints that “On the Floor of Heaven” isn’t a forgotten country masterpiece.
“Raised on Robbery” and “Deliver Me,” the album’s obvious bid for a hit single, have a hint of the ’90s penchant for tight, clean pop -- think Gin Blossoms -- despite all the country signifiers. And at The Blue Shadows’ best, they fill their loneliest songs with a gravity and pathos that earns the band its comparisons to its country betters.
Download: “Deliver Me,” “On the Floor of Heaven,” “And the Curtains Close” and “Is Anybody There?”
Singles
Kid Cudi (feat. Kanye West): “Erase Me”
A few songs leaked from Kid Cudi’s upcoming “Man on the Moon II: The Legend of Mr. Rager” -- the sequel to his 2009 debut album “Man on the Moon: The End of the Day.”
The most immediately grabbing is the lead single “Erase Me,” an arena-rock song posing as hip hop. Booming programmed drums and grunge-rock guitars with Cudi winningly sing-rapping a big chorus, “Erase Me” reminds me a little bit of the mid-90s when catchy, oddball singles from some flimsy rock band such as Lit might get radio play.
Weezer: “Memories”
I’ve long since abandoned my youthful attachment to Weezer. I enjoy the irony-soaked third stage of Weezer’s career with the same detachment I enjoy watching 35 minutes from “Enemy of the State’s” middle section on FX while I’m on the treadmill at the gym.
I’ll acknowledge that with every Weezer album there are inevitably a handful of tuneful, well-crafted pop songs, but I don’t exactly feel any attachment to them.
And that’s fine. I enjoy plenty of disposable pop, but wow, “Memories,” the first single from the band’s upcoming album “Hurley” -- the “hilarious” cover of which is a picture of “Lost” actor Jorge Garcia -- doesn’t even clear the extremely low bar I’ve set for Weezer.
The lyrics are pro-forma late-career River Cuomo, with plenty of clunky pop cultural references and lazy sentiments that feel like placeholders for genuine emotion, but the chorus occupies an awful no man’s land between over-the-top enough to be truly annoying, yet not sufficiently pushed into the red to reach an Andrew W.K. level of ridiculous transcendence.
