Our Happiness is Guaranteed
From Janet Weiss’s opening salvo to the first action-painting splatter of Sam Coomes’s keyboard on this track Our Happiness is Guaranteed, the album Featuring Birds is Quasi at their peak, melding jams-kicking rock’n’roll, punk action, and chord shifts that feel like the change of a season.
Birds
Indie rock had seen power duos before: Guv’ner, Royal Trux, Buckingham-Nicks, the Carpenters – but they’d never sounded like Quasi and the tracks in their Field Studies album positively glow.
It’s Hard to Turn Me On
How can songs about anhedonia, the inability to experience pleasure, feel so good? Mixing uppers and downers isn’t usually advised, but Weiss and Coomes use the device to make a musical space that feels unique to Quasi.
Smile
Weiss and Coomes travel backwards through the backwoods of AM pop and Pebbles psych to create a new form: bar-room baroque. Smile brings honey-golden multi-tracked vocals and some of the bleakest, black-eyed, black-hearted lyrics ever put to paper – all played with the kind of ramshackle ease that only comes from weeks of practice, months in the van, and serious chops.
The Iron Worm
On drums and harmonies, Weiss is all low-key Bonham-ie, power with poise. On top Coomes’s Roxichord makes you wonder how the electronic harpsichord never took off, its low-end crunch with top notes sounding like Ray Manzarek with a Super Fuzz.
