Immortal Monday: Quasi’s Featuring “Birds”

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MP3: Quasi- I Never Want to See You Again

MP3: Quasi- The Happy Prole

MP3: Quasi- Nothing From Nothing

Buy Featuring “Birds”

In today’s world of immediacy it is hard to find something with actual staying power.  At least that’s what I find with the music industry.  Again, due to the influx of new music hitting our ears at lightspeed time barely allows for us to reacquaint ourselves with an old favorite or do anything more than glance at the cover and tracklist of an album that you once knew better than those superb stats from your final year of Little League.  Hence, Immortal Monday.  To reiterate what was stated when this first began, for this weekly post we will harken back to an album that has meant the world to us for one reason or another.  Sometimes it will be an album that nearly everyone in the world has touched and other times it will be one that many may not know even exists.  But all of them will be works that, for me, are automatic mood changers or fun savers.

This Monday it will be the former in both instances.  Quasi’s Featuring “Birds” is an album that most people haven’t heard of but is definitely something that I turn to when I need the day to do a complete 180.   It’s melodic.  It’s harmonic.  It’s explosive.  It’s poppy as hell. And most importantly it has 100 % sing-along-ability.  The band consists of former spouses, Sam Coomes (KEYBOARDS, guitar, and vocals) and Janet Weiss (Sleater-Kinney, Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks) on drums and vocals.

I first heard this 1998 gem at what was once a honey trap for music, a goldmine for discovering new noise, Fuel Cafe in Milwaukee, WI.  While you sometimes had to work hard to like some of the eccentric sounds that came out of those shitty speakers, Featuring “Birds” and I skipped the courting phase.  I loved it from the minute I heard it.  For comparison sake, it sounds an awful lot like an Elliott Smith record with a ferociously sincere backing band (Quasi actually was Smith’s backing band on tour in 98 & 99 and Coomes played bass on Smith’s Figure 8)   Much like Smith’s, the lyrics are dark and often morbid but they are sung, for lack of a better adjective, sweetly.   And also like Smith’s, the songs aren’t strung together or hand picked words that have a far too obscure symbolism or absence of meaning.  They are full of substance.  Well, minus the title track that is just, well, birds.  But I can guarantee you, if you at all like the tracks posted above, the rest of the album jangles and sways the same.

The trifecta of Coomes’s roxichord, Weiss’s  fantastic skills at the drum kit, and their still married vocal harmonies, blend together to make an album that I return to monthly.  From song structure to lyrical content to listenability,  this record has 0 off putting qualities and is therefore, immortaL.  Leave a comment and let me know what you think of it.