POP MUSIC
Francine subverts the ordinary, again Second CD is a wistful, idiosyncratic puzzle
By Jonathan Perry, Globe Correspondent, 2/2/2003
Francine's Clayton Scoble rarely lets himself - or listeners - off the hook with an easy couplet or an obvious choice. Rather than painting his narrative sketches by the numbers, the songwriter prefers reconstituting the raw, often converse elements of his material (aching desire, clever detachment, keen observation) into an inscrutable, absurdist compound of funny first impressions, fleeting sensations, and brain-teasing wordplay that's simultaneously allusive and elusive. ''Subliminal blackmails,'' a phrase that floated by on a song on Francine's first album, ''Forty on a Fall Day,'' is an apt one that captures its author's lyrical approach. The Boston band's wondrous new disc, ''28 Plastic Blue Versions of Endings Without You'' (out Tuesday on the Somerville-based Q Division Records and available at www.qdivision.com), again leaves it up to the audience to deduce Francine's sense-memory scenarios using Scoble's verses as clues to a crossword, or as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle whose picture materializes incrementally. The album reestablishes Scoble as one of this city's most imaginative songwriters, and Francine - a band bent on subverting the ordinary - as one of its most fetchingly idiosyncratic. Who else but perhaps confessional singer-songwriter Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes (whose latest CD is titled ''Lifted, or the Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground '') would opt for such an opaque album title? Pop culture name-checking fiend that he is (''28'' even contains a reference to catching a Bright Eyes show), Scoble grins impishly at the suggestion. ''When we were going over possible titles, a lot of people cringed,'' Scoble says on a cold afternoon at a Somerville bistro. (The phrase stems from a lyric in a new song, ''Chlorine.'') ''I'm definitely guilty of obfuscating stuff and if it's a personal lyric, I tend to fold it up into a little note that you hand to the person sitting next to you in fifth grade,'' Scoble says. ''It's selfish in some ways because there are little private jokes that you're handing to a very small [group] of people, so it's kind of unfair that you're not really making things as accessible as possible.'' Scoble sounds apologetic, sort of, but as a recovering Pavement junkie - another band that enjoyed wrapping crooked stories in cryptic riddles - he can be forgiven his predilection for emotional camouflage. In fact, most of the source material the ex-Poundcake singer tapped for the new album sprang from a painful experience: a breakup and its bitter aftermath. ''I had gone to a water park with a gal I was really fond of and it was just a sweet memory,'' Scoble explains. ''We spent time drifting in this moat, where you sit in these little tubes and float and hold hands underwater and it was all really romantic and wonderful.'' The water slides, as he observed later during a considerably less wonderful period, were made of blue plastic. Scoble fast-forwards to the part of the script where ''I had gotten crushed in a way I hadn't experienced before, and in a demented, masochistic pilgrimage, I went back to this place by myself. It was kind of creepy, but at least on the way back, I realized how ridiculous it was and maybe I'd gotten that out of my system. Certainly, going through a rough romantic patch in life is a fastball right down the middle of the plate - it's pretty easy to use as a springboard.'' More contemplative in tone and tempo than ''Forty on a Fall Day,'' ''28'' also reflects Scoble's growing infatuation with vintage keyboard sounds, which glow, gurgle, and pulse through the album like a tender, layered heartbeat. The disc also bears the skewed pop stamp of Jack Drag wunderkind John Dragonetti, who produced the album and gave it an intricate, lambent sheen that captures the wistful temperament of the material. That's not to say songs such as ''Ratmobile'' don't rock dirty and hard, because they most definitely do. (How could a tune that name-drops David Lee Roth and Man Ray not?) ''It came together really great,'' Scoble says of Francine's collaboration with Dragonetti, who also contributed assorted percussion and keyboard parts. ''We knew each other in passing and I've always loved his records and especially appreciate the sonic breadth of what he does [with Jack Drag]. Working together in the studio was eerily easy.'' After a long hiatus from performing, the band - which also includes guitarist Albert Gualtieri, bassist Sean Connelly, and drummer Steve Scully - has been rehearsing the new material (a CD-release party is set for March 7 at the Institute of Contemporary Art). To help reproduce the new keyboard-driven songs onstage, Francine recently added a fifth member, Paul Simonoff, formerly bassist in the brainy Boston pop group Baby Ray. Scoble says he's feeling much better these days - no more solitary trips to water parks - and he's itching to perform again. ''I just feel like I'm incredibly lucky to have a label that wants to put the records out,'' he says. ''And if anyone along the way enjoys listening to the record, it's a bonus. On the rare occasion when someone comes up to me and mentions the last record or wants to know what's next, that feels really nice to know someone's interested. That's really flattering and makes you feel like you're doing OK.''
This story ran on page N4 of the Boston Globe on 2/2/2003.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company