Secretary Bird: "Somewhere Girls"

I've been toying with the idea of reviewing this music biz vet's solo debut for weeks. I've heard Mike Semple's soundtrack work, listened to him play with Giant Sand and Friends of Dean Martinez, asserted that Secretary Bird couldn't possibly be a band to come out of nowhere, drop a half-dozen self-involved observations about life on the road and then disappear into a fog of their own datedness and irrelevance. Semple's status as a borderline session musician notwithstanding, I was looking forward to hearing what someone disinterested in using their debut to lay an ego's foundations would have to say.

The album turns out to be not terribly good. A few standouts weakly prop it barely above largely unimaginative songs with lyrics one might find scrawled across high school notebooks, and so my stillborn review has instead transformed into appreciation for this simple, classical opening track. A mid-tempo rock song through-and-through, on "Somewhere Girls" Semple's guitar is magnified to huge levels and his intuitive, textural playing seems a repeated counter-argument to the song's (and album's) insipidness ("hold your hand out / for your hand out / hold your heart out"), the lackluster, near-invisible rhyhtm section, and Semple's competent if unremarkable vocal melodies. When the song breaks down into a three-bar bridge, the bass disappearing and Semple's guitar becoming delicate and airy, it's convincing stuff.

That "Somewhere Girls" is written with a guitar player's strengths in mind doesn't necessarily highlight his weaknesses. Simplicity itself, the song meekly plods along in its own world. Taken on its own terms that's not so bad; so much more a shame the same can't be said for the album that follows it.