Whenever I tell “normal” people what I do with this column, I get this reaction: “It must be hard digging up material” or “Wow, you must have to wade through some serious crap!” See, local music is made by a small handful of losers who practice alone in their bedrooms dreaming about the day they could shake Bono’s hand — didn’t you know?
Okay, well, some of it is made that way, but even that stuff is pretty good. Boston-based Steve Mayonne’s Bedroom Rock Star, which is just about what it sounds like, was one of my favorite surprises of 2005.
Other people criticize me because I don’t criticize what I write about often enough. Fact is, I get so many local albums coming through my mailbox that I can pick and choose the good and pretty much ignore the bad. I criticize by omission.
Every once in a while, though, something comes along that feels like vindication. The undeniable worldwide success of Ray LaMontagne felt pretty good, sure, but better are the results of the RPM Challenge, a project organized by alt-weekly newspaper the Wire, in Portsmouth, that asked area artists to write and record an entire 35-minute album in just the 28 days of February. Shockingly, 220 bands and solo artists signed up, with just a month’s notice. Even crazier, more than 160 albums were delivered to Wire offices by March 1.
One hundred and sixty albums. All by people who live and work within about a half-hour of Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
“And it doesn’t suck!” bursts Wire editor Karen Marzloff. She’s had the same kinds of conversations I’ve had with the real world, but she doesn’t have to defend this stuff to me. The albums won’t be posted for a week or two on www.rpmchallenge.com, but you can already check out a bunch of the material on different bands’ MySpace pages and through the blog that the musicians have been contributing to on the RPM site.
One of the project leaders is Jon Nolan, former Say ZuZu frontman and a solo artist of some accomplishment with last year’s When the Summers Lasted Long. He’s served as music editor for the Wire since last summer and he was one of the driving forces behind getting so many musicians involved. I haven’t met many locals who don’t just respect the hell out of him, and the two songs he’s got posted on his MySpace page don’t disappoint.
Best is “Bye, Bye.” It’s got a poppy acoustic bounce with a verse that falls down in the second half and then chimes in with a great singalong chorus full of oohs and aahs. It’s a breakup song, or a breaking with the past: “Don’t even bother calling/ I’ve turned off my phone.”
