New new wave

Future Bible Heroes and Pulsars

by Matt Ashare

For large segments of the American rock underground in the '80s, synth-pop was viewed as nothing short of a vapid opiate of the masses. And though new wave began as a reasonable option for punk's artier renegades, it rapidly degenerated into what any self-respecting Black Flag fan saw as a transparent cash cow for hair salons, MTV, and coke-addled A&R scouts. Nowhere were these bitter sentiments more clearly communicated than in the second-to-last verse of X's 1983 "I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts," where John Doe and Exene Cervenka damned the glitter-disco-synthesizer British invasion and made one final plea for radio programmers to broadcast the guitar-driven sounds of punk America.

Well, their wish was at least partly granted -- Cervenka and X drummer DJ Bonebrake are now playing with Rancid's Matt Freeman in Auntie Christ. Meanwhile, new-wavy synth-pop of the sort practiced by two new outfits -- Chicago's Pulsars and the NYC/Boston collective Future Bible Heroes -- doesn't seem like such a bad idea. Maybe it's just that in contrast to the barrage of electrobeats favored by the likes of the Chemical Brothers, the Pulsars' two-minute pop songs and the rich melodicism of Future Bible Heroes offer a kind of psychic comfort. That's part of it. But there are subtle ways in which the new new wave improves on the old.

For starters, Pulsars (who come to the Paradise, in Boston, in support of their homonymous Almo/Geffen debut to open for Supergrass this Wednesday) and Future Bible Heroes (whose Memories of Love was just released by Slow River) aren't Duran Duran-style fashion plates. You'd be hard pressed to find enough hair spray between them to support the plume of even one of A Flock of Seagulls. They both come out of the Amer-indie tradition of geeks making good. And though the two groups draw on different influences from the past to feed their futuristic muses, each is aided by time's tendency to transform yesterday's trash into today's golden kitsch. The buttons Pulsars and Future Bible Heroes push trigger more than just sequencer patterns. They bring back vivid pop memories.

Future Bible Heroes comprise indie rock's maudlin poet laureate Stephin Merritt, his Magnetic Fields partner Claudia Gonson, and DJ Chris Ewen (he spins locally at Man Ray, in Cambridge). Ewen spent the latter half of the '80s as a keyboardist in the Boston-based Figures on a Beach, who released two Simple Minds-sounding discs on Sire before calling it quits. Memories of Love is his chance to revisit his roots, updating the old with newer touches like the lounge exotica swing of "She-Devils of the Deep" and the industrially skewed squiggles and blips that interrupt the flow of "Hopeless." Ewen wrote and recorded the music for Memories of Love alone, then entrusted it to Merritt, who penned some of his trademark playfully depressive lyrics and conjured gorgeously sad vocal melodies.

The result finds the very human voices of Merritt and Gonson rubbing shoulders with icy synth floes, robotic percussion, bubbling synth blips, and gleaming sequencer patterns. Merritt is no stranger to synth-pop -- Magnetic Fields discs have always employed synths and drum machines. But Memories of Love takes him further into techno-land than ever before, accentuating the evocative ghost-in-the-machine contrast between his deadpan, world-weary rhymes ("There's no use even trying because it's hopeless/All of our dreams are dying of overdoses" goes the chorus to the aptly titled "Hopeless") and the cold, compelling rush of mechanized beats. Magnetic Fields fans will hear this as Merritt entering the realm of slick production and (in my opinion) rising to the occasion. Others may be shocked by the disc's aggressively retro stance, but the songcraft of Ewen and Merritt easily transcends the limitations of genre.

Chicago's Pulsars -- studio whiz/singer/songwriter David Trumfio and his drumming brother Harry -- aren't interested in transcending anything. They're happy inhabiting the modernist techno-pop universe outlined by '80s artists like the Cars, Gary Numan, and New Order, though David's dryly comic odes to a Pittsburgh tunnel ("Tunnel Song"), the state of Wisconsin ("Wisconsin"), and a pet robot ("My Pet Robot") overlap with the quirky turf staked out by Frank Black, as does the aliens-are-leaving-Earth lament "Runway." David is in love with aesthetics of a disposable pop culture, but the melodies he wraps around lines like "Silicon teens use drum machines and tambourines/Silicon teens are from England" are sturdy and infectious. And "Silicon Teens" reminds us that some silicon teens grew up in America.

Pulsars open for Supergrass at the Paradise this Wednesday, May 28. Call (617) 562-8800.