It's New to Me: Out There in the Dark by Outrageous Cherry (1999)

Photograph from the dealer's catalog of the Richard Douglas firm, 1904

I picked up Out There in the Dark based on Carl Newman's recommendation. Not that Carl came over to my house and said, "You know what you should hear?" But the new New Pornographers record came with a bonus 7" single of Outrageous Cherry covers, and that seemed like a pretty strong endorsement from the band's frontman. So I went out and got Out There in the Dark, the album that contained two of the three songs covered on the 7" - I could just listen to the 7" itself to get an idea of how good the songs are, but hooking up my turntable is SUCH a pain. And I trust Newman's recommendations - I bought the Sex Clark Five's Strum & Drum because he gushed about it in an interview. I love that record now, and I'm already warming up to Outrageous Cherry in the same way.

It's weird that Outrageous Cherry has not been on my radar AT ALL - I think I had them confused with the atrocious Buckcherry. Anyway, they're a psych-pop band from Detroit that's been around for about 15 years, and (based on what I've read) Out There in the Dark is considered to be one of their best releases. At first glance, Out There in the Dark has a promising format - twelve concise pop songs (none over 4 minutes), plus an 11-minute jam at the end. On first listen, though, I was struck by some odd sound choices that can be jarring. The album's opening track, "Georgie Don't You Know" is a creamy pop tune, but it sounds like frontman/mastermind Matthew Smith has run all the sounds through a rusty spring reverb unit. As a result, it sounds like the band is playing at the other end of a piece of PVC pipe pressed against your ear. The album's second song, "Togetherness", gets a similar sound treatment. And so the album goes with minor variations - by the time I hit the middle of the album, the echoey sound was actually kind of comforting. I found myself realizing, though, that the album's first two songs were amazing pop songs with distracting production touches. I had to start the album again to hear those songs again with less fresh ears.

So that's basically the deal with Outrageous Cherry - the hooks are great, although Smith comes close to crossing the line into generic retro-pop at times. Little touches like the backward guitar on "Only the Easy Way Down", a whistling solo on the crunchy "Where Do I Go When You Dream?", and the horns on "A Bad Movie" provide some necessary variety, and the vocal reverb actually helps draw attention away from the fact that Smith has a pretty ordinary-sounding voice. There's no argument with his skill as a songwriter, though - he churns out concise psych-pop songs with remarkable consistency on Out There in the Dark. And the great thing about discovering a band like Outrageous Cherry is that their albums are, for the most part, readily available used, so I should be able to pick up more of their stuff easily.

"A Bad Movie" by Outrageous Cherry