One Track Mind

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

[ download ]

On “Stealing Cars (Second Wind),” Los Angeles-dwelling Aussie transplant Andy Clockwise splits the difference between The Hold Steady and The National–he aspires to Springsteenian grandiosity but is fairly morose as he does so. It sounds like a track from Eddie and the Cruisers if the soundtrack had been provided by the American Music Club instead of John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band.

It’s very dramatic–perhaps foolishly so. Sincerity has finally been working its way back into indie music of late after two decades of ironic slacker domination, but it can still be a tricky thing to pull off. Clockwise mostly does, and when the music swells behind his Matt Berninger/Mark Eitzel vocals at the song’s climax, the effect is more likely to get the fist pumping in the air rather than the eyes rolling in the head.

Still, one wonders what a generation raised on Stephen Malkmus-style detachment will make of melodramatically bellowed phrases like “So I could become, Father, everything you hate, everything you hate” and “If there really was a Jesus Christ then why didn’t anybody help me?”

Clockwise manages to sell the sentiment through the sheer, admittedly somewhat overwrought, conviction of his performance. Now that it’s once again acceptable to be influenced by Bruce Springsteen, Clockwise seems poised to make the most of it. On “Stealing Cars (Second Wind),” he’s taken one of Springsteen’s favorite topics (that would be stealing cars), staked out a corner in the darker part of the Boss’s office, and gotten down to work.