Time fades away

The Odds still have the young-man blues

by Charles Taylor

Nest (Elektra), the new album from the Canadian band the Odds, opens with a number that turns out to be uncannily accurate. "Someone Who's Cool" is the sound of a young man admitting that he's playing a role and hoping he can pull it off without having his voice crack. Guitarist/singer Craig Northey gives it something -- not in the voice, but in the attitude -- of the young Rod Stewart, a boyish heart. "It was the suit that got me the gig/It was the tear that got me the girl," Northey sings, almost sheepish but then owning up, "I'm a sheep in this wolf clothing/I'm a picture that I'm holding/Of someone who is cool."

What's wonderful about the track is the way it suggests the coming-clean romanticism that's at the heart of all boys' rock, from Stewart to the Replacements. As I listened to Nest, the band's fourth album, I kept coming back to "Someone Who's Cool." Not just because it's the best song on the album, but because after almost half a dozen times through the record, I have no idea who the Odds are. Nest is the damnedest album to get a fix on. It's consistently listenable, frequently witty, sometimes touching. You can hear the craft that's gone into the playing and writing on track after track. It's by no means hack work. And yet, if I had only Nest to go on, I'd feel that the Odds were total strangers to me.

Nest is a seamless procession of pop styles. "All the things about me are forced," Northey sings in "Make You Mad." That's a charge I'd never level at the band. The influences here are obvious, but they're also expertly exploited. Yup, that's Squeeze you hear on "Make You Mad" (with the rhythms tailored to fit the clever lyrics, instead of the other way round) and on "Nothing Beautiful." But what's that background, the bass and drums, on "Nothing Beautiful?" Oh, yeah, White Album-era Beatles. Then you could say that "Say You Mean It Wondergirl" might work on a Posies album, if the Posies weren't already trying so hard to be Big Star. And the closer, "At Your Word," with the distorted guitars proceeding from midtempo to flailing over the course of the number, and Northey's vocals becoming frantic in the manner of Southern-rock white-soul guys, has licks that the Black Crowes wouldn't mind copping.

I don't mean this to sound as if the Odds were simply aping other artists. It seems to me that they've absorbed two styles -- the literate pop that flowed from the Beatles and the cheery only-a-lad rock that flowed from the Faces -- so completely that nothing here is mere copying. What they haven't done is made the styles their own. That's a shame, because Nest suggests a band able to pull off some difficult things: the first-chill-of-fall feeling to the break-up song "Hurt Me"; the accelerating tempo of "Night's Embrace," which stretches out, becomes louder and freer and larger in scope without ever sacrificing discipline; the rave-up of "At Your Word," with a manic fury the music can barely contain cut dead at the end. But looking over my notes for Nest, about cut after cut I've made notations that amount to "nice rocker; not much going on."

Nothing on Nest, or sadly on any of the Odds' albums since their 1990 debut, Neopolitan, has come close to "Wendy Under the Stars," which remains one of the great rock songs of this decade. The song relates a story that's been told often in rock: a young man is seduced by an older woman. The difference is that this seduction takes place on the night that Elvis died. And it doesn't matter that it's August -- the chill of mortality is in the air. If the King is dead, how can a 17-year-old feel that his future is endless? The song is as much the end of something as the beginning, a passage into a world that holds decay and death as much as pleasure and the illusion of boundless freedom. The refrain, "I was fucking Wendy under the stars/The night that Elvis died," with its mixture of the earthly and the otherworldly, the crude and the poetic, is a shorthand summing up of the contrary impulses at work in Elvis and in this couple's lovemaking. It's sex as an act of mourning, the couple's unconscious promise to stay true to a spirit they can probably intuit more than articulate. On "Wendy Under the Stars," time stands still for an instant. On the pleasant, inconsequential adolescent rock of Nest, it seems to have retreated to the past and frozen.