Gem
Hexed
1995, Restless Records
Happy September, folks.
August will probably always be a slow month on this site. I write everyday, but in the drag days of late summer in Texas, my brain takes a vacation. I won’t repeat my rant from the beginning of my Jill Cunniff piece from last year, but I always spend the 100-plus degree days of August annoyed at everything. I make notes and write fragments for new articles for this site, but in my cranky, sweatball state they rarely feel like anything worth pursuing. If this was my job, I could work my way through this misery, sure, but this is not my job, so I can say “fuck it” with impunity and just not update for a few weeks.
Now, it’s mid-September and it’s still fucking hot (Texas), but the nights are getting more pleasant. The supermarkets have Halloween displays up. Changes are happening, however slowly. The leaves here haven’t yet changed color, but as the world around me slides back into routine, I feel myself receiving good energy again.
What I’m trying to say is that I’m in the mood for some for some killer back-to-school rock and Gem’s shotgun blast of a debut album nails it. Maybe none of these guys had been in school for awhile when they made it. Maybe main songwriter Doug Gillard had been in bands for about fifteen years at this point. Nevertheless, they still kicked up the kind of blare and had the kind of songs that, in a better world, would have shouted out of high school parking lots in 1995.
From the cynical, misfit kids, at least. The kind of kids who could hear a song like “Your Heroes Hate You” and it just confirmed what they suspected about the world already.
This sounds like an album that should have made major waves in 1995, but it didn’t have a big international conglomerate major label logo on the spine. No hard sell from industry assholes. either. No, all it has going for it is a bunch of great songs from a band who seems to dig T. Rex and Cheap Trick and Redd Kross and Grant Hart and want to keep the good shit like that going. That’s it–and over two decades later, that’s all you need from it.
I don’t have a lot of fond memories of 90s mainstream American alternative rock, but I do still like the odd thing here and there. Off the top of my head, that first Foo Fighters album has some good stuff (I drifted off after that). I still think that Belly’s two cut-out bin staple albums are good (their Rolling Stone cover issue in ’95 was a notoriously poor seller). Singles from the likes of Matthew Sweet and The Lemonheads still work for me. Were Material Issue mainstream? I can’t remember, but I still like them, too.
90s alternative rock wasn’t a bad idea. A sizable segment of it was bands who were the sons and daughters of the likes of Big Star and The Raspberries, guitar-heavy acts in search of a perfect pop hook. The genre just got bogged down with hacks who stole the most obvious shit from the most obvious sources. They leaned too hard on loud-quiet-loud structures, trendy distortion pedal blurts, and slacker angst until the whole thing became a cliche.
Gem, however, weren’t among the hacks.
It was a band made up of seasoned guys from the Cleveland rock scene and their hyperactive first album bounces like a pinball against cool influences all over the place. The word of the day here is pop. Doug Gillard’s songs (along with a good one from bassist Jeff Curtis and three from Tim Tobias) are hard and soft in all the right places and every moment serves a melody. It’s snotty and mean and even when it slows down for a ballad, it’s still tense in the shoulders and dying to just get to the hook already.
The album’s top shoulda-been-a-hit is “Suburban Girl”. It rocks, it’s funny, and it’s got a chorus so infectious that Doug Gillard had to invent a word just so that it scans perfectly.
“You’re driving me wild with your charmadang”, Gillard sings. (“Suburban Girl” is one of only three songs here to have its lyrics printed in the CD booklet.)
What’s a “charmadang”? I guess it can be whatever you want. Personally, my thoughts go straight to the gutter.
I mean, have you heard Gillard’s “I Am a Tree” (which Gem put out on a 12″ single a year later and then shortly after was recorded for a Guided by Voices album)? The guy’s got a filthy mind. I oughta know. I’m a filthbag myself. I’m disgusting. I should be kept on a leash.
Let’s also pay respect to the line “I really like your lawn/ Suburbs made me yawn until now”. And, YES, your humble reporter is hip to the double-entendre.
This album is horny and funny and sometimes sad, but most of all, it’s angry–and anger can be a lifeforce. If you approach it right, anger can keep you going. Every truly funny person I’ve ever met is angry on some level.
What I’m trying to say is that nobody in Gem is killing themselves anytime soon. When the world lets them down, they don’t stare into their navels. No, they go on a rant via luscious verse-chorus-verse.
The saddest song on this album is also angry. It’s called “I Hate It” and it’s about witnessing a loved one spiral into drug addiction (“I hate it/ When you get high/ Because I lose you”). Meanwhile, the song itself has one of those pop melodies that’s just pure sunlight even when it’s played in a rush, as it is here.
The wired opener “Sheep” has the classic line “You think you’re bad shit ’cause you got got a sports car/ But you and me know that’s where all the dorks are”.
“Your Heroes Hate You” is some bitter medicine delivered over the most frantically nervous drum beat of ’95. After that assault, “Only a Loan” provides the comfy pillow that you need, even if it’s nervous in its own way. Love gone wrong can cut your heart right out of your chest, but it does make for great songs.
More crunch and melody follows. If you like the first few songs, you’d have to be a complete moron to not like the rest. It all culminates with “2 Me Now”, a six-minute slow-burner that sings you to sleep just right.
When Doug Gillard joined Guided by Voices a couple years later, a few of the dumber souls of the GBV fan contingent at the time worried that he was some kind of guitar wizard fuckface who couldn’t wait to “shred” all over Robert Pollard’s songs.
Clearly, NONE of those people heard Gem, whose first album is all about pop kicks. If there’s an extended guitar solo anywhere on it, I don’t remember it. It’s just hooks and heart everywhere.
Doug Gillard to me will always be a songwriter first. He’s a powerful, versatile guitar player, but underneath that muscle is a guy who just wants to play songs–and he’d get even better at it as he kept going. His beautiful solo albums later hold up next to the likes of Marshall Crenshaw and Emitt Rhodes.
Slow Writin’ Dipshit Jason (that’s me) hopes to cover them in this series sometime before the robot apocalypse starts.
I really enjoyed reading this…thanks for calling out this great album! Love that guitar riff on “Yeahya!”