Portastatic | Be Still Please (Merge)
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Portastatic’s ninth full-length, Be Still Please, takes no part in this noxious mythology–it’s a record about getting older, about being a husband, a father, and an American, but it plunges forward into the challenges, fears, blessings, and joys inherent to grown-up family life. It’s a strange album for its earnestness and honesty, but also because front man Mac McCaughan seems to be hitting a hot streak 21 years into his career–this is his 23rd album, counting releases by his bands Superchunk and Bricks. Most of the Superchunk diehards who make up Portastatic’s audience have long moved on, which frees McCaughan to tend to his vision without worrying about holding the hands of his old fans. It’s their loss, though: Be Still Please and 2005’s Bright Ideas are some of his finest work, both as a songwriter and a lyricist. Plus it’s a relief to see 39 painted as a bright picture–despite its thorny realism, the new album’s full of hope and utterly free of self-pity.
Superchunk classics like “Driveway to Driveway” captured the bittersweet melancholy of dawning adulthood, and Be Still Please follows that feeling into parenthood and beyond. McCaughan portrays it as a sometimes difficult trudge, but its domestic routines are comforting as well as boring–he finds something sweet in averageness. In his narrative the passing of the years is marked by Xs on a calendar, the skinny arms of his growing daughter, the gathering of dust, the knowledge of the exact dimensions of the marriage bed, the deepening understanding of the meaning of commitment. On “Getting Saved” he delivers a line as touching as it is eviscerating: “I decided to freak you out / To see if there’s a limit on love / When you discover what that promise is really all about.” But though the “we” of the record is a literal family, not the metaphorical family of the punk scene or “we” the drunken malcontents of this crap band, McCaughan hasn’t let go of his political indignation–he keeps
You fuckers made that impossible to say.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Maggie Fost.
