Lightning Love – November Birthday

So, I was watching “Top 100 Songs of the ’80s” with my roommate and, lo, Poison’s “Every Rose has its Thorn” is ridiculously high on the list.

Jesus of fucking Christland! I was furious!

I can’t stand Monster Ballads, and I’m guessing that this song was one of the “genres’” progenitors. My problem is that said Monster Ballads are sour and phony attempts by mediocre pop songwriters at revealing true human emotion and heartbreak. It’s as if Poison was going along their merry way, cock-rockin’ there way into easy drugs, salacious groupies, and lots of money, and all of a sudden Guns ‘n Roses comes out, kicks everyone’s ass, and bands like Poison need to retreat into phoniness to make more money because Axel and Slash have fucking smoked them at their own game–and they wore make-up too!

“November Rain” is not a Monster Ballad. It’s a fucking masterpiece. The only Monster Ballad worth its weight is “More Than Words” by Extreme, which really does convey actual emotion, and is brilliantly written. My other roommate assures me that Mr. Big’s “To Be With You” is a close second, and ok, I’ll buy that. The rest is soulless.

So why this tirade?

Because Lightning Love brings us a pop album with seemingly simple lyrics and situations that would seem nearly high-schoolish to the uncareful listener, but do a masterful job at conveying actual emotion and feeling. The situations Leah Diehl, the band’s lead singer and keyboardist, conveys are of relationships messed up by human mistakes, with the effect of losing dear people and friends, and the feelings that follow–sometimes a prideful indifference, sometimes a deep regret, sometimes stoic remembrance, sometimes deep sorrow, but always very human, very real.

The album is short and the textures are sparse. Eleven songs running less than a half-hour. Some fast and jerky. Others, lovelorn ballads that even the craftiest of pop songwriters would envy for having not written. Lightning Love has put in their time playing concerts all spring, summer, and fall, finally delivering the album that so many of their constant fans have been waiting for. The songs that we fans have heard for the past 10 months (the first time I heard them was last winter’s Blowout) are there.

The fast-moving “Everyone I Know” declares both proudly and sorrowfully that “everyone I know is no good at nothing at all” and you can’t help swaying along. The pulsing drive of “Girls are Always Wrong” warns of the consequences of not knowing the consequences of your actions, and follows with the sorely learned, nearly existential insight “I know no one’s ever right. / It’s proven every time. / We’re human that’s what happens and it’s never worth a try,” followed by the jealous loner tirade of “Girls who are Taken.” “Good Time,” the album’s closer, is irresistibly dance-y, an ode to impulsiveness and a complaint to a helpless lover of the travails of the life of boozing and partying as if it’s your last night on earth. If you’ve seen Lightning Love at all, you’ll instantly recognize these songs, and chances are you’ve had them stuck in your head for months.

“Friends” is perhaps one of their most recognizable songs, a gentle pounding beat that grounds a sweet and mournful wondering and pleading, “If you know where my friends are hanging out…would you please tell them to come talk to me?” prefaced by a regretful “All it takes is a phone call / to say that I’m so sorry.”

But the big payoff on the album are the songs you’ve never heard. “Friends” is followed by perhaps the truest and barest song on the album, which I believe they have not played in concert. “Warmer Days Ahead” is a very simple affair, just piano, voice, and an overdubbed vocal round of the main melodies at the end, but it’s a song that I imagine Jens Lekman or any other sorrowful and sweet pop troubadour would have loved to have written. It’s about winter, and naked piano and voice always connotes winter to me. The song reveals a persona effected deeply by the cold chill of the weather around, bleeding into the soul from the outside. The lyrics are simple, but not plain. They’re troubled, and so human in that the speaker is cognizant of what’s going on inside of her, but without the ability to act. “When winter gets cold I freeze / every kind part of me.” How many of us have felt that? Probably most of us.

Whenever I listen to an album, I always look to see which song is in the very middle: which song is the heart of the album? It’s no surprise that “Warmer Days Ahead” is the middle track, and it’s followed by the title track, “November Birthday,” which is odd as a title track because it’s an instrumental, and only 50 seconds long (a song like “Warmer Days Ahead” requires a denouement), but this short and bare piano vamp is essential to the transition to the rest of the album, which picks up steam song by song, slowly and deliberately to the end.

November Birthday is quite a low-fi affair, and guitarist Ben Collins and drummer Aaron Diehl, both of whose playing in concert is essential, are absent on parts of the record. Instead, it’s a light feast of piano, synths, and Leah Diehl’s singing, with Ben and Aaron picking up vocal here and there. The tracks are well-placed on the album, each gliding into the next seamlessly, logically, composing a landscape with hills and valleys of sound that seem natural, the way that actually hills and valleys lie on the green (and seasonally snow-covered) earth.

It’s easy to sing that every rose has it’s thorns, but it’s different to write about the ways those thorns can prick the skin and how the thorns hurt the rose just as much as the one who beholds it. It doesn’t always take the vocabulary of a Leonard Cohen or the virtuousity of a Jeff Buckley to convey those feelings. Sometimes, it takes a minimalist pop album that is true to itself and not trying to impress anyone or do anything than do what music is supposed to do: recognize the human condition and what it feels like to have to be living simultaneously in the world and in your head.

“Friends” – Lightning Love

Lightning Love release their album with the help of Friendly Foes and Charlie Slick at The Blind Pig this Saturday in Ann Arbor.