Simplicity works, but then again so does advertising. In many ways it is a miracle that I have ever heard anything from Extra Small Records given their limited exposure throughout this virtual universe known as the internet. It is truly surprising to me that the San Francisco based label, which from what I’ve heard seems to excel at delivering familiar, yet uniquely simple and catchy pop music, has provided potential listeners with so little to grasp onto. After searching for an hour or so on the internet for any information about the label and specifically the Lolls, all I was able to come up with was a barely interactive homepage, a Myspace profile with 2 friends (one of them being Tom, the other a band that’s not even on their label), and two album reviews (one positive, one negative). That being said, it should come as no surprise that I did not hear about them from the internet, but rather from the real world. When local record store 33 Degrees closed down several years, they had a sale on everything, so as a result I bought a lot of interesting looking albums, sound unheard.
The Lolls debut album, Come On, was one of the CDs I took a chance on. The duo of Gail Conway & Jordan Rode won’t blow your mind with their instrumental expertise, nor will they win you over with their innovative ideas about song writing, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t have some things going their way. To me, the obvious draw are the female vocals which are decidedly unpretty, and certainly not the kind you hear everyday. They have a little Kim Gordon apathy to them, but for the most part they have an individuality all their own. The music is very straight-forward low-fi garage, but it’s the vocals that really sell the songs. On a track like "Jesus," where the lyrics are not only cheesy ("Save the drama for your momma, Get your groove on,"etc), but, for lack of a better description, dumb, Conway’s over-exuberant vocals illustrate yet again that in music, it doesn’t matter so much what say as how you say it. The same can be said for a track like "I Don’t Care," that breaks zero ground in the originality of it hopeless lyrics, but is nonetheless effective in it’s delivery.
Jesus
Girlfriend
I Don’t Care
I swiped the title for this blog from the negative review of the Lolls album because I found it funny that the author actually thought that this modest duo could ever "harm indie rock’s image", whatever that means. Indie rock is more than some sort of minor league where potential major label talent gets an opportunity to "shine," or at least it should be. If anything, I think a band like the Lolls represent an essential aspect of what indie rock should be, a place for anyone. Not everybody can play guitar with the technical precision of Stevie Ray Vaughn, but his music bores the shit out of me, and sure Minor Threat’s songs sound like they could of been made by anyone, but to quote myself, "they weren’t, they were made by Ian fuckin’ MacKaye!" The bottom line is that you might not like the Lolls, but it won’t be because they sound like everything else in your collection.
Extra Small Record’s last release appears to have been in 2003, but there is still a mailing address and e-mail address here if you are interested in purchasing anything from them.
–Popkoff
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