The Aislers Set
How I Learned To Write Backwards
Suicide Squeeze
Everyone knows summer albums — and summer songs — are supposed to come out between late April and June. The time period is sufficiently warm and sunny, yet early enough in the year when an album like Yo La Tengo's I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One can become a score or soundtrack for an entire season of sunny good times.
But the Aislers Set is on to something with its latest, How I Learned to Write Backwards.
Here on the San Francisco five-piece's home turf — which has been basking in a bright haze of perfect February and March afternoons for the better part of a week now — the group's third album is a perfect sorta summer album. It's just the thing for that lovely, prematurely sunlit bend of Highway 101, where you (traffic permitting) whip around a corner near the Sausalito exit to find the Golden Gate Bridge, downtown SF, Alcatraz and a whole bay full of sailboats spread out before you. Or even the 80-foot-high exchange from Interstate 580 to Highway 24 in Oakland, which slingshots you around a banked 90-degree turn (meant to be taken faster than the posted speed, of course) before routing you into Rockridge, Elmwood, Telegraph Avenue or UC Berkeley.
As a quick Google search reveals, it's pretty much impossible to talk about the Aislers Set without making some kind of reference to Phil Spector, who produced such girl group, wall-of-sound hits as "And He Kissed Me" and "Baby I Love You." More recently, he's accused of killing an aging B-movie actress he invited back to his place for some nookie. And the comparison needs to be made. Vocalist and prime Aisler Amy Linton has one of those echoey dreamtime voices that would headline a list called 100 Things You Don't Hear Much in Music These Days. The group's lo-fi production, reverbed surf guitar and love for simple rhythms propelled by snares, bass drums and handclaps, only serves to make the comparison more apt.
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Linton and Co. get things started with the bouncy "Catherine Says," in which a handclap-driven beat gives way to a cascade of reverbed guitar distortion before Linton closes out the song with what sounds like a schoolgirl's chant: "That's not what Catherine says, that's not what Catherine says..." "Mission Bells," which kicks off what sounds like a nod to the opening riff of "Paint It Black," takes a drastic turn just six seconds in, with a sort of indie-rock Spanish guitar setting the pace for surf-rock chords and trumpets that chime in during the song's bridge.
But the group falls into a trap: Its songs, with their layered production values, three- to four-minute lengths and similar tempos tend to run together. How I Learned to Write Backwards isn't the kind of album that's going to turn up new rewards. Its marginal utility tops off after about 10 listens. To put it yet another way, it's probably not coming along to many desert islands.
Nonetheless, for a resident of the greater Bay Area, it's hard to think of another album that feels so "right here, right now." It's as if the Aislers Set went and released an album just for their millions of Bay Area neighbors, maybe hoping a bit that the rest of the country would discover the album during their own springs or summers, whenever those might be.
But in the meantime, forget all those East Coast people with their terrorism alerts — the ones who are still shoveling snow, plugging in their cars at night and curling up by the fire with a book and a cup of tea. It's time to hop in the convertible, grab a burger and shake at In-N-Out and hit the open road, Jack.
— Eric Wittmershaus (ericw at flakmag dot com)
