The Nadas: Transceiver

It’s another Friday night at your favorite suburban pizza joint, an independently owned place that’s been around for years. While you enjoy your first slice of cheese pizza — because pepperoni gives you heartburn and you don’t care for veggie — the local cover band starts to play over in the adjoining bar. Their songs are heartfelt, distinctly American tunes, by groups whose names you can almost remember: songs like “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”, “Runaway Train”, and “Closer to Free”.

“This one’s got a good beat,” you turn and say to your husband of 20 years as the kids race to get refills on their pop. The guitars are rootsy, the bass inconspicuous, the drums straightforward, and the beer Lite.

That scene represents what’s best and worst about Transceiver, the fourth studio album by the Nadas, based in Des Moines, Iowa.

The best: The Nadas are totally ordinary.

The worst: The Nadas are totally ordinary.

Heartland rock is supposed to be ordinary, to revel in its simple authenticity (hence the band-owned label, “Authentic” Records). That’s peachy, if you’re Tom Petty and your songs themselves are distinctive even if the arrangements are old as rock ‘n’ roll. Write lyrics as memorable yet unpretentious as “She’s a good girl, loves her mama / Loves Jesus, and America, too”, and you can back them with whatever music you want.

The Nadas are not Tom Petty.

“My world has changed from how it was before”, Mike Butterworth sings in his smooth baritone on “Now That I Found You”, a track that reeks of single. “It complicates everything a little more”.

“My world has changed”. How has it changed, exactly? It’s changed “from how it was before”. Well, that’s enlightening. So what happens now, Mike? “It complicates everything a little more”. What complicates everything? Every what thing? A little more than what? (The unforgettable chorus ties it all together: “I’m losing my mind now that I found you”.)

They’re a perfectly competent band, but then, so was Hanson, and the members of Hanson were just kids. But these guys are grown-ups. Bluegrass singer Alison Krauss, another grown-up, realizes that she’s a better singer than songwriter, and once recorded a gorgeous cover version of the Foundation’s pop classic “Now That I Found You”. Next to those two recordings, it’s hard to call the Nadas’ “original” composition anything but redundant.

Not that it’s a crime to recycle a song title. Take, for instance, the horribly trite title “Hold On”, which, aside from being another potential Nadas single, also graced excellent songs by hipster luminaries Lou Reed and Tom Waits. Along with a radio-ready power-chord progression and jokey (but subtle) Casio keyboards, the Nadas’ undeniably catchy “Hold On” boasts a mildly clever motif: “half a picture of us” keeps getting carried around. The band’s biggest mistake here, though, is awkward repetition in each verse. Not only does a girl leave, she’s “leaving leaving”. The singer is “mending mending”. The two were “drinking drinking”. For those of you actually paying attention to the lyrics, I’m puking puking.

Someday I’d like to be that couple at the pizza restaurant. I’d like to be able to enjoy the moment without thinking about it, tap my foot to a song without over-analyzing its lyrical and melodic content — just live my life. Then I’d love the Nadas, at least as much as I loved whatever band was playing that night. That’s normal, right?

But that’s not who I am, and since you’re surfing the Internet reading album reviews, I think it’s safe to say that’s not who you are, either. Sure, Playboy named the Nadas “The Best College Rock Band You’ve Never Heard Of.” Then again, Playboy also named one of my own college bars, Nevin’s in Evanston, Illinois, “College Bar of the Month” in 2002. Nevin’s is a really nice place. I go there all the time, just like I go to my favorite locally owned pizza restaurant. But I wouldn’t recommend it to the rest of the country.