Camper Van Beethoven
Popular Songs Of Great Enduring Strenght And Beauty

THE REVIEW

A day like any other, in search of my fix. I find this album for €4.90. I had vaguely heard about them somewhere. Okay, I'll take it. I slide it into the car's CD player.

Love at first listen. And I wonder: at 34, am I still allowed to get excited about an album? It seems so, because the blend of psychedelia, folk, roots, ska, country, punk, and damn rock'n'roll orchestrated by these tough guys led by David Lowery (later in Cracker) overwhelms and crushes me. It had been since the days of "Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain" by Pavement that an alt-rock album from the stars and stripes convinced me so much.

It opens with "The Day That Lassie Went To The Moon": slacker pace, drunk Beach Boys-style harmonies, and above all else Lowery's desperate voice singing about that little dog that went up there. "Opi Rides Again/Clubmed Sucks" begins with a country-flavored march, sinks into a Stooges-like nightmare, and then becomes a hardcore shard, with the SST logo materializing on my stereo's display. Damn, this is flying high.

With "Sad Lovers Waltz" I get emotional, I see myself at twenty with a Guinness in hand, inside a provincial town's pub with a cigarette hanging from my lips (and yes, I'm part of that generation that smoked indoors), with this damned drunken country song bouncing in my eardrums, and don't start that dance, you fool, because it's the waltz of sad lovers. The Camper warned me, but I fall for it again. And so be it.

And still. "Good Guys And Bad Guys" reconciles me with the world, now I'm all smiles and easy harmonies, I shout it at the top of my lungs out the window, the Pixies jamming with the Byrds, and I am happy.

What else can be said? "Take The Skinheads Bowling" is the perfect pop piece, "Eye Of Fatima" has a desert-like flavor that almost makes you feel the sand in your mouth (and a damn good bass line, oh yes), "Ambiguity Song" possesses a pathos I hadn't felt in years, Lowery's suffering voice sends shivers to the brain. And then that damn violin (played by Jonathan Segel). Always present, always spot on, always doing the right thing.

I've arrived. Park, turn off the stereo. I have that silly grin on my face. My partner won't understand, but I don't care. I am in love.

This is an anthology released in 2008 by Cooking Vinyl. The Camper is a group active since the '80s, recently reformed.