Papas Fritas
Throughout the history of pop music, youth (or a reasonable simulacrum thereof) has been one of the few constants: it never seems to get old. Even in the 90s, decades after the death of innocence, the idea of youth can be played with and pulled apart or, if necessary, bludgeoned into newness. Girl punk bands toy with images of childish vulnerability to bust up the absurdity of prescribed feminine identity. Marilyn Manson makes a Saturday-morning cartoon of sex and death. The most nefarious gangsta rappers offer fantasies of sex and violence in the voice of arrested adolescence because coming from adults they’d sound like rank idiocy.
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Boston’s Papas Fritas, who play Saturday at the Empty Bottle, have reacted to all this deconstruction with a carefully constructed nostalgia for pop’s purer days. They approach teen innocence as wistful twenty-somethings–they’re looking for the musical equivalent of virgin sex, and they wanna have it 12 times a record.
Eventually, their dispassion becomes a spooky metaphor for all things cynical and slack. Which is too bad, because they’ve obviously worked their asses off giving their record its obsessive, Brian Wilson-like polish. Sadly, they’ve polished it to plasticity. Helioself is the weirdest kind of 90s record, a dissertation on form that, no matter how great it sounds, just doesn’t feel good. Give me “Be My Baby” any day. I wanna fall in love.
