After the Gold Rush
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Fig Dish has managed to outlive some of its faster-rising guitar-pop peers–the more sought after Loud Lucy, for instance, broke up after one poorly received album. Fig Dish’s first LP, That’s What Love Songs Often Do, is actually better than the new When Shove Goes Back to Push (Polydor), its simple but pleasant hooks presented with a charming snottiness and driven into the brain by sheer exuberance. But despite plum touring slots with Veruca Salt, the Gin Blossoms, and the Rentals, its hypercharged power pop failed to connect with record buyers. According to an article earlier this summer in Billboard, the band was disappointed with the album’s performance, a sentiment the label’s A and R director expertly recast by saying “the extra energy of frustration was poured into songwriting.”
After replacing drummer Andy Hamilton with Bill Swartz (of Ultra Swiss, a band led by ex-Veruca Salt drummer Jim Shapiro), Fig Dish returned to the studio, where, from the sound of it, they just plain tried too hard. In the Billboard article, singer-guitarist Blake Smith cites Styx and REO Speedwagon as influences, and while the band tends more toward post-Nirvana soft-hard dynamics than all-out cornball grandeur, the album displays the same kind of saccharine inanity that eased those AOR whores down millions of gullets. It was produced by Phil Nicolo of the Butcher Brothers, the duo that polished up Urge Overkill’s Saturation, and he’s slapped a similar polyester sheen on Fig Dish, down to the “ooh ooh ooh” chorus on “When Shirts Get Tight.”
The current double issue of the Nation is devoted to music, and while it predictably nods to leftist-feminist paragon Ani DiFranco and her Righteous Babe label in no fewer than three articles, the magazine does a fine job of elucidating how the tightening grip of multinational entertainment conglomerates stifles art–even lowly pop music.
