The Albums That Matter: Big Echo

Joe runs through every album on his iPod, mostly in alphabetical order, and offers some brief thoughts. Check out previous columns HERE.

Big Echo

POP ETC

2010

Everyone once in a while a dumb hypothetical exercise tweet will circulate through my corner of the internet. This was last week's:

The obvious answer is "any of these besides Phoenix." The less obvious answer is that there is an album that could stand tall to all four of these B-level indie rock touchstones, but it has already been forgotten.

Big Echo is so forgotten that I saw "Big Echo" coming up in the Albums That Matter queue and had to listen to it again to figure out what the fuck it even was. But man, I'm glad I did listen, probably for the first time in years. I didn't find a true hidden classic or anything, but I did find a nice little indie pop gem that could wipe the floor with any of these so-called paradigms of the genre (again, besides Phoenix).

The funny thing is that Big Echo was produced by a member of Grizzly Bear—Chris Taylor, their bassist and also producer. This makes the comparison easy. Big Echo is also a catchy little thing, all wrapped up in ramshackle indie attire. There are hazy harmonies, loose drums, lazy lurching tempos, vocals that sound like the fourth singer in Dr. Dog. I guess you might describe it as "California sounds via Brooklyn hipsters," but that's really just a guess (I dunno, read Meet Me in the Bathroom if you want).

This is pretty much the same thing that Grizzly Bear shoots for, except I'd argue that that band rarely succeeds at it (though "Two Weeks" was beat into my brain by the algorithm). POP ETC succeeds. Well, at least at a much higher clip than Grizzly Bear does. So, in a sense, Chris Taylor helped them to out-Grizzly Bear Grizzly Bear.

If we're going to continue with the comparison (against my better judgment—I really don't know that much about Grizzly Bear, guys), then POP ETC does something every once in a while that Grizzly Bear rarely does, and that is inject some motherfucking energy into this joint. Sure, most of it is hammock-at-dusk indie, but those slower exercises don't drag the album as much when they are surrounded by jams like "Cold War (Nice Clean Fight)." That shit worked surprisingly well, and still does a decade later.

I'm not even saying that the slower songs are something to "suffer through" or whatever. I enjoy them, the woodsy psychedelic slow jams and the soft guitar balladry alike. But I enjoy Big Echo because it doesn't consist entirely of them. There's a variety. Call it a buffet of blog rock you used to love in high school.

So it's a shame that POP ETC kinda got swallowed up in the black hole of late-'00s and early-'10s indie rock. I think it's a worthy addition to the canon—at least more worthy than something like Merriweather Post Pavilion anyway. But it'll never be included in a dumb tweet like the one above because it didn't bring anything new to the table. It did everything that all those bands were already doing; the only difference is that they did it well.

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If this album sounds interesting, then try this song: "All Day Day Light"

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Stray Observations

• So how did I originally come to obtain this album? Easy. Pitchfork gave it a "Best New Music" during a time in my life when that award still actually meant something to me. The review made it seem pretty good, so I bought it. I may not have appreciated it fully at the time, but ten years later I still have no regrets.
• I wasn't sure whether to include this in the essay proper, and ultimately decided not to, but POP ETC was not this band's name when Big Echo was released. They were known at the time as "The Morning Benders," but they changed their name in 2012. I did not know about it until this week, so that should tell you how closely I've been keeping tabs on POP ETC in the past decade.
• They changed their name because in England, "bender" is a homophobic slur. I also did not know that until this week. I know close to nothing about British culture outside of music, but yeah, I guess I could picture Ricky Gervais using the term in an attempt to be edgy. 
• Homophobic language aside, we can all agree that "POP ETC" is an infinitely worse name, right?
• ALBUM COVER: Sometimes, there is no meaning behind it. Sometimes a band just likes one of their friend's photographs and wants to use in on their album cover. "It’s our friend Hannah [Hooper] who’s from San Francisco, she’s an amazing artist. It just fit, too, really perfectly. It’s really nice to find something like that because it wasn’t done for the album, it was just a piece of hers."
• ALBUM NAME: I couldn't find anything specific about the choice of title, but I can read between the lines. Big Echo is the band's second album. Their first is called Talking Through Tin Cans. I've never heard their debut, but from what I've read, Big Echo is a big jump for them sonically, a classic sophomore "leveling up." One might even compare the jump to going from tin cans to producing a very large echo.
• I don't recall ever writing about POP ETC on this blog before, and certainly not during our decade-in-review coverage. Though, by releasing Big Echo on January 1, 2010, they weren't doing themselves any favors in that regard.
• I took a look at what else Chris Taylor has produced, and I didn't recognize any other albums on there besides Grizzly Bear and POP ETC. He did, however, play horns on the great Return to Cookie Mountain, so there's some trivia for ya.
• I also read a lot more replies to that tweet than I should've. But I was surprised that there was no decisive answer to the hypothetical. C'mon, you guys, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix is so fucking good!

NEXT TIME: Big Red Machine by Big Red Machine