Saturday Looks Good to Me
Issue #34
Fill Up the Room (K)
By John Everhart
Published: December 1st, 2007 | 4:02pm
On “Money In the Afterlife,” the centerpiece of the excellent Fill Up the Room, Saturday Looks Good to Me’s Fred Thomas assuredly sings of “this sense that nothing is over and nothing’s begun yet.” The music itself chugs along with a mid-period Cure-like ebullience combined with a full-throttle chorus echoing Stephen Malkmus’ “Jenny and the Ess Dog,” but it’s the sentiment of the lyric that captures the elusive appeal of the record.
While many of the key signifiers of SLGTM’s past bubblegum pop sound are embraced on Fill Up the Room, nascent elements are integrated in the form of tape loops, tribal drum beats, and burrowing noise jams. Songs are often decidedly non-linear, cascading and smoldering, recalling the icily introspective and experimental sounds of Arthur Russell and Panda Bear.
Thomas writes from a feminine perspective as poignantly as Stuart Murdoch here, crafting expository character sketches that send up sad-eyed, flawed characters compassionately. The melancholy vignette “Peg” gently suggests to the titular protagonist, “You won’t remember being lost in the after hours,” while the sweet jangle rush of “Make a Plan” finds Thomas playfully crooning like Jonathan Richman: “Jenny so theatrical / Singing before seven you’ll be crying by 11 and your tears could float a boat.”
The record closes with its two masterpieces. Penultimate track “Come With Your Arms” is a spare lament framed by wounded Elliott Smith–like harmonies, sung by Thomas in a pitch black sepulchral warble; “Whitey Hands” intimates a rebirth, all campfire sing-along guided by phantom incantations and fractured rhythms on which Thomas condemns the prosaic (“The billboards made me ill / Their nauseating symmetry”). He then capitulate with the exultation, “Hold your hands up, and let that be our love,” his words radiating like a space heater in a dank attic, filling up the room with a disarming level of warmth and optimism.
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