#403: Sloan, "Underwhelmed" (1993)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkN_qkN5JLQ

Glenn McDonald, in one sentence, described Sloan's debut single "Underwhelmed" more accurately than I can improve on: it sounds like Ozzy Osbourne and band covering a lost They Might Be Giants song. Depending on your mental image of TMBG, if you have one, that could be deceptive: they have their educational songs ("James K. Polk", "Mammal") and their absurdist songs ("Hall of Heads", "the Guitar") and their gleefully petulant children's sing-alongs ("I Should Be Allowed to Think", "Boss of Me"), none of which he or I are referencing directly. But They Might Be Giants also have a romantic streak that leads, in some of their greatest songs, to the kind of relationship and/or character portraits that an over-educated, absurdist, self-awarely petulant romantic might write ("She's an Angel", "Ana Ng", "They'll Need a Crane", "Sleeping in the Flowers").

Sloan's public emergence came on the college-rock circuit in 1992 or 1993, depending where you live, either of which was in the post-Nirvana period of mandatory loud distorted guitars; but the Chris Murphy-penned "Underwhelmed" is exactly that TMBG sort of relationship song.
It's one where the relationship hasn't moved beyond a modest number of awkward verbal exchanges, and probably won't -- but that's the most common sort anyway. "We were talkin' about people who eat meat/ I felt like an ass cuz I was one/ She said 'It's okay', but I felt like I just ate my young.// She is obviously a person with a cause/ I told her I don't smoke or drink/ She said that I should loosen up, on her way to the LC". Sometimes life is kind and you get several chances to make a second, third, and fourth impression. It doesn't guarantee you won't misread the data and screw those up in different and novel ways.

Our narrator is a pedant: "I was underwhelmed if that's a word/ I know it's not cuz I looked it up". The dictionaries have, of course, caught up by now, although they'll still agree with him about "'Affection' has 2 f's/ especially when you're dealing with me". His crush object is still correct that dictionary worship is annoying; the iPhone has a Scrabble app that can tell you after each move what your actual best move would have been, and while sometimes it's fun, there's nothing very charming, in my opinion, about it telling you that you should have played "ZORIS", or "AMIGAUT". Especially when it insists that "ASSWIPE", using all seven letters (50-point bonus!) on a triple-word score, is not an English word at all. I would not go on a date with the Scrabble dictionary.

But the noisy, pounding, cycling energy is fun -- Murphy apparently was in awe of My Bloody Valentine while writing, but Patrick Pentland's nasal Ozzy-ish whine and his own firm tenor harmony, plus the chirpy melody, ruin the resemblance, and I'm glad. "She rolled her eyes/ her beautiful eyes" is a good line setting up the even better "She rolled her r's/ her beautiful r's" later, and the narrator's lack of resentment is far more healthy than his pedantry is un-. Sloan would later sound more like a '70s rock band -- like people who've memorized their ELO and Raspberries and Aerosmith and Who records -- and at album length I think I like them better that way, the melodies cleaner and pushed to the front. But "Underwhelmed" sounds both cheerful and frantic, and we have to figure that joint energy will get the narrator somewhere nice eventually.