Out & About

Speaking generally for a sec, I don’t like singers who talk instead of sing. That’s why hip-hop (well, besides Ol’ Dirty Bastard and Biz Markie) took a while for me: no singing, just talking. Or rhyming. Or whatever. (To clear my name, I have of course since seen the light–or at least Pharoahe Monch’s “The Light,” which features some wicked vocalizing–and have realized that in rap, talking is singing. Or rhyming. Or whatever.) But something about the way Chris Leo talks makes me want to sing. He used to do it when he fronted the Van Pelt, a band that used to name songs things like “Young Alchemists” and “Do The Lovers Still Meet At The Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial?” and then fill them with angular, herky-jerky swatches of post-punk guitar detritus and poems about puppies and speeding trains and the way the sky looks after it rains. Leo was great in that band, standing bow-legged with his guitar strung sassily around his neck like a wallet-chain version of Walt Whitman and Amelia Earhart and Tiny Tim and Molly Ringwald rolled into one, spewing his magic realism into the stale, steamy air of a few hundred underage venues nightly and sometimes even daily.

So I was genuinely saddened to see The Lapse go the way of all bands vivified by the spark of free floors when they broke up a few years ago. But then I was happy again the first time I saw The Lapse and realized they were pretty much the same band. Betrayal!, the Lapse’s first record, actually introduced pretty much exactly the same band, complete with a stripped-down version of the one about the puppies and the speeding trains. I like Heaven Ain’t Happenin’, the record they released last April on Chicago indie Southern Records, more, and it’s not just because bassist Toko Yasuda takes the mic a few times and actually, really, physically sings a couple dozen notes. That helps, but what I really like about it is the way Leo’s worked his old mojo into a post-collegiate frenzy.

He fills the songs he sings–oops, talks–here with the kind of bewitching wordplay you gotta work hard–or not at all– to crack: “This country of continents is a culture of condiments/Our pantries are stocked with relishes and after-dinner mints/Our children are raised on mustards and party dip.” Funny stuff, and true, too. And it rhymes. Or whatever.