SSLYBY sticks to Missouri roots

The Springfield, Mo., band focused on vocal melodies in their latest album.

By Kelsey Whipple

Published April 11, 2008

If everything in the world were as it should be, Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin would be as popular as their namesake wasn’t. Take Missouri’s third-largest city, multiply by Polyvinyl, add The Shins and divide by “Garden State,” and you’ve got SSLYBY — disarmingly poppy proof that there’s life after “Juno.” For reasons beyond its name, the foursome plays a different breed of indie-pop, a sort of underdog adorableness best defined by its reliance on the seemingly ordinary to create the addictively extraordinary. If ever a band could make Boris lovable, it’s this one.

The band’s latest album, like the lo-fi debut before it, finds the mild-mannered underdogs responding to love and life in the same fuzzily imperfect way they tackled Russian politics — hooks piled on melodies on top of harmonies, the end result like heroin for the ears.

Pershing is the perfect soundtrack to lives spent living in and rocking out of Springfield, Mo., as the self-billed “third best band on Weller Street.” It’s a miracle these guys escaped Zach Braff.

“Glue Girls” is hardly the first sign that SSLYBY has a future beyond Weller. The song about loving one of two inseparable sisters (“Come on, girls, this isn’t funny”) is all clean instruments and dueling vocals, echoing the heartland pop traceable throughout the album. Lines like “I tried to change their chemistry/I tried to make one stick to me” make use of the formidable pop sensibility found in Broom’s “Pangea,” the title metaphor sweet but not sickeningly so. The fact that “get the girl” is first on the agenda only makes Pershing’s winsome lines more endearing.

“Think I Wanna Die” demonstrates the band’s subtle understanding of the line between sentiment and sap. “I’m on my broken knees, no end of sorrow/Sorry if that’s twee but it’s tomorrow’s hope.” It’s the kind of thing you write when you have nowhere to go but anywhere, and perhaps that’s the point.

Later lyrics pan out to resurrect what is best described as “vox pop”: it’s rare to find a band whose eyes reflect so well both inward and outward. Pershing’s lines are as indebted to the group’s home state as Missouri is to Mark Twain, with family, friends and local landmarks (“Heers”) all appearing on the album to varying degrees. SSLYBY has nothing to gain by hiding its intentions in placid rhymes, and instead the guys might have effectively called shotgun on MO-pop.

Pershing doesn’t have the same soft production its predecessor did, but it doesn’t really need it. On their sophomore album, the members of SSLYBY have come into their own, reigning in Broom’s guitar-driven melodies to add on coos and brass — along the way drumming up all the sentiment they could muster. But they still recorded the drums in a closet.

If you listen closely, everything that made the band’s debut so endearing is still here — Springfield, Springfield girls and four Springfield guys who should be treated, if not like kings, then at least like Vampire Weekend. Pershing is a great indie-pop album — an achievement in what it is to be young and an album in which everything good is overshadowed by something better. I, for one, still love them.