by Huw Baines (@huwbaines)
The thing that the middleweight divisions of power-pop and college-rock can truly see eye to eye on, and commiserate over now that their races are largely run, is spotty quality control. In both camps there have been a lot of great singles bands who never became great singles bands because they never had a hit—that just makes you an unlucky band without a firm grasp on how to mine your best work for similar seams of gold.
That reality also masks the fact that this is high-wire stuff—it is not easy to put melody front and centre at all times, and it’s even more difficult when the idea is basically to write verses better than the choruses of other songs. To hit on this nerdy sort of alchemy even once is remarkable. To do it as many times as largely forgotten bands such as the Mice or Shoes did is dumbfounding. Really, these no marks are giants.
In this context Dazy’s MAXIMUMBLASTSUPERLOUD is one long, drawn out dumb idea. It’s 24 songs front to back and spans a year of flat out writing and one man recording from James Goodson. It takes the drive to write as many gilt-edged hooks as possible one after the other and shines an unforgiving spotlight on it, daring us to mark it down at every turn. It’s also completely, heart-burstingly brilliant.
These songs are like dropping diamonds into heavy machinery—the onslaught of fizzing melodies add warmth and a sense of easy familiarity to a barrage of fuzzy guitar tones and unrelenting, impersonable drum machine thud. Operating in reverse order, with five unreleased songs first out of the gate, Goodson uses sequencing to up the ante further, with the implication that the record should taper off into an uncertain, half-finished state of figuring things out by the time it winds down.
The final songs, “Bright Lights” and “Accelerate,” which comprised his first single, are as good as anything else here, shoveling elements of Teenage Fanclub at their most shoegazey into the mixer with riffs that would have been radio-ready thirty something years ago. In a similar fashion to Tony Molina circa Dissed and Dismissed there’s simply no let up, with the conveyor belt imparting a sort of giddiness that’s totally addictive.
There is a great deal of finesse and genuine, honest-to-goodness work involved in this compilation, but it doesn’t feel that way. It’s stacked with the best kind of songs—the ones that fly by with a sort of insouciant brilliance. MAXIMUMBLASTSUPERLOUD rules so much, and with such a sense of shit-eating fun, that feels like there’s an apology owed just for going beyond that sentiment.