Mistle Thrush: Drunk With You

So what the hell is “goth” music, anyhow? Once upon a time, in a fabled era when men wore skin-tight jeans and as much hair spray as your mother (come on — it was only like 17 years ago), “goth” was characterized by shimmering, minor key guitars, creepy schizoid vocals, and a decidedly hackneyed glam-punk bent. Lots of eyeliner, a questionable sneer and a general derision for life didn’t hurt, either. But not anymore. Today, the phrase gets tagged onto every Tom, Dick and Harriet who happens to wear dark eyeliner and a melancholic streak in general. More than one critic has called Garbage “goth” and meant it.

To make matters worse, if you were once considered “goth” and no longer want to be — think Daniel Ash or the Cure — your career’s an uphill battle. You’ll never escape the tag. You’re forever cursed — no pun intended — with the stigma of catering darkly to a dead genre. And forget the late-90s “goth” revival. Never really existed. Neither did Marilyn Manson. Sorry to disappoint.

All of which, no doubt, makes Mistle Thrush’s life that much more difficult. Difficult because the band’s last album, 1997’s Super Refraction, dabbled so heavily in dark moods and toxicity that you’d be hard pressed not to call it “goth”. Difficult because lead singer Valerie Forgione has a penchant for wearing so much flashy makeup she could put a small department store out of business. Difficult because guitarist Scott Patalano dresses like the nemesis from some rotten ’60s spy flick and creates enough crystalline textures that one would think he studied under the equally pensive Cocteau Twins’ Robin Guthrie. (It’s assumed he didn’t).

The good thing for the Boston, Massachusetts-based band is that its new album, Drunk With You, doesn’t sound anything like Super Refraction (or Silt or Agus Amarach before it). Now the band’s all glittery guitar pop and heavy alt-crunch, the kind of stuff you’d hear on the radio about five years ago alongside No Doubt’s “Simple Kind of Life” and Garbage’s “Special”. It’s crafted a fine album of silvery-neon guitar rock, able to walk with its rock contemporaries in equal stride. Still, with virtually no trace of the downtrodden gloom of the Mistle Thrush of old, it continues to get the “goth” tag from rock writers. But then, we’re back to the whole “Garbage/My Bloody Valentine/etc. create ‘goth’ music” thing again, aren’t we? Aaah, sometimes there’s no winning.

No doubt, Mistle Thrush sound a whole Hell of a lot like Garbage here. The sheer volume of Blondie-esque New Wave pop sensibility on Drunk With You is, to say the least, overwhelming. Opening track “Small”, for example, opens with a backward reverbed guitar and a delayed-feedback riff reminiscent of the Smiths’ “How Soon is Now?” before launching into a classic college-rock chorus. Before setting a precedent, however, second track “3 Girls Walking” is to “Small” what “One Way or Another” was to “Hanging on the Telephone” on Blondie’s Parallel Lines. A straight ahead college-rock tune, “3 Girls Walking” begins with a solid girl-pop riff perfect for Forgione’s whispy vocals, and centers on a dreamy chorus in which she can let her vocal chords play to their heart’s content. “Neil Diamond” follows in a similar vein, and is the second track to find Mistle Thrush reaching high for that pop bauble in the sky of stardom dreams.

But if there’s any reason for the band to be let loose from the goth/college-rock chains, a song like “Fanfare Spark” would be it. Providing quite possibly the most splendid vocals of this pop year, “Fanfare Spark” is a crunchy, mid-tempo feeler, the perfect length and mix, and so obviously the “single” that other songs seem almost overshadowed by its chutzpah. Those “others”, like the jazz-inflected “Give a Little Love”, the dreamy “Drowning for William”, and the acoustic rhythmic mind-screw “Lillies”, however, do give the track a run for its money (even if “Lillies” first line is pilfered from Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game”).

Drunk With You is a good strong album, and it deserves to be heard more than it has. Sure, there are a couple of moments on the album that hold Mistle Thrush back, most notably a grunge-era knock-off (“Enginehead”) and a complete sleeper (“Heavy-set John”). All in all, though, the album shows Mistle Thrush is a band 90 percent of the way towards creating the perfect, sentimental rock album, and a world away from its somnabulistic dirges and muddy, shattered emotions of old. Now if only the band could shake the “goth” tag — then it’d be getting somewhere.