It’s only been a year and a half since Bob Mehr profiled the 1900s in the Meter, but my, how they’ve grown. Back then they were a somewhat untested combo that had only been playing shows for seven months, and they were still weeks away from their debut release, the EP Plume Delivery. But they already had a knack for engineering ambitious, baroque pop structures–though they’re a seven-piece, with keys and strings and boy-girl harmony vocals, their songs would sound epic and orchestral even played by a power trio. Now that early promise has been fulfilled: after a year packed with shows to promote Plume Delivery, both in Chicago and on the road, they’re intimidatingly tight, and the EP’s lead single, “Bring the Good Boys Home,” is the closest thing to a local hit the Chicago indie scene has had in years.
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When the 1900s appeared in the Meter, they expected to have put out their first LP by this spring, but Cold & Kind (Parasol) just dropped last week–Friday’s show is a release party. Even if you’ve been following their steady evolution into a beautiful machine for the delivery of pop bliss, even if you’ve seen them so often you can sing along with songs they haven’t recorded yet, the new album still might catch you off guard. It’s actually kind of spooky how good it is. With its wealth of unforgettable hooks and its intricate, sensitively executed arrangements, it feels like a classic on first listen–it’s the kind of record that seems to come from a more perfect dimension (or at least from England), not from the band next door. If the 1900s keep this up, it won’t be long till the rest of the country falls for them just as hard as Chicago has.
As great as Cold & Kind is, it won’t make the 1900s into stars overnight. Sure, they can pack a month’s worth of weekly shows at Schubas, but outside Chicago they say they sell their CDs mostly to door guys and soundmen. So they’re doing the working-band grind, making weekend jaunts around the midwest or to the east coast, driving down to Texas for SXSW, doing stints opening for other bands. (They say they genuinely enjoy spending time together–which is good, because if you cram seven people into a van and they don’t get along, somebody’s gonna get abandoned at a rest stop.)
The industry’s also losing the support of its own cash cows. There are still a few major-label artists willing to plead against P2P, but A-list defectors from the reigning business model are making more noise. Radiohead is selling its new record online as a DRM-free download, without the help of a label, and asking people to pay whatever they like–even if that’s nothing. And Trent Reznor has been encouraging his fans who feel burned by artificially high CD prices to pirate his music.
