The Minders
GOLDEN STREET
(spinART)

Based in Portland, Oregon, but featuring English-born Martyn Leaper, who spent his boyhood listening to BBC Radio 1, the Minders recall a bevy of top-shelf pop bands — all of them British. Like Arthur-era Kinks, XTC, and the Beatles before them, the Minders cast a keen eye toward suburban life, status quo drudgery, and the people who subsist inside cookie-cutter row homes. The group’s ’99 full-length debut, Hooray for Tuesday, was alight with breezy daydreams and pastoral flights of fancy made all the more so by the sunny production stamp of Apples in Stereo’s Robert Schneider.

This time around, the Minders — whose core membership is the spousal songwriting team of Leaper and multi-instrumentalist Rebecca Cole (bass-guitarist Joanna Bolme has since left to play with Steve Malkmus) — take matters into their own hands and offer a more aggressively jaded (but no less catchy) view of the world around them. On one level, Golden Street is a collection of snazzy pop songs. On another, it’s a thematically linked song cycle about living through the numbness of suburbia and finding solace in small comforts — whether that means building private kingdoms of fantasy ( " Treehouse " can be heard as a bittersweet update of Ray Davies’s " Shangri-La " ) or just rocking out in one’s garage ( " Right as Rain " ). Like Syd Barrett’s acid-dipped grin, or David Lynch’s perversely warped version of America, the scenes on Golden Street are rarely what they seem. Look underneath the gilded strum and bounce of the title track, for instance, and you’ll discover the curdling hope that comes from trying to climb a ladder with rotted rungs.

Issue Date: March 15 - 22, 2001