Listen Up: The Tourettes Are Dead, Long Live The Tourettes

I wore a lot of skirts my freshman year of college, but one of my favorite songs that year was “Pants Fever,” a catchy little tune by a band that I’m pretty sure you’ve never heard of.

And I mean that in absolutely the least snobby way possible. You don’t not know them because you’re not cool enough. You don’t know them because, really, there’s just not that much to know.

They were called The Tourettes. Not these Tourettes, or these Tourettes, but these Tourettes. I found them through my cousin Marie, who was also in her freshman year of college up in Massachusetts, a few thousand miles north of where I was in school in Georgia. That spring—along with albums by The Shins and The Decemberists that are still among some of my all-time favorites—she mailed me a plain silver Memorex CD-R on which the words “THE TOURETTES” and “LIFE IS PRETTY” were carefully detailed in Sharpie.

The Tourettes were Marie’s then-boyfriend’s sister’s all-girl rock band, and it’s actually kinda quaint to think that there was a time in my life when someone with that kind of tenuous personal connection to a band would push the music on me without any kind of winking nod towards my day job. It’s also kind of quaint to think that there was a time when The Tourettes could have been absolute unknowns.

Life Is Pretty was 11 tracks of wonky, dusty garage girl-pop, from the giddy “Pants Fever” down to a particularly indignant cover of Linda Ronstadt’s “You’re No Good.” The lead singer, the sister of the boyfriend of the cousin, had a voice that was always jumping from lovely high notes to a snaggly, sassier lower register, like she was singing into a hairbrush in her bathroom mirror. It doesn’t totally sound like the six band members—all classmates at Yale, I think, but maybe not—knew what they were doing, but has that ever mattered? Does it matter now?

The Tourettes were like a sweeter, smarter version of The Coathangers (I’ll take their “You’re Inappropriate” over “Don’t Touch My Shit” any day of the week), a cheerier Vivian Girls. If they’d come out six or seven years later, maybe they’d have been fodder for over-eager bloggers, not just cousins-of-girlfriends-of-little-brothers. Maybe they, too, would have been bit-torrented and hyped and shoved into dirty clubs at SXSW and CMJ way, way before they were ready. And maybe they’d have been huge.

And then what actually happened would have happened anyway: The band would have graduated from whatever East Coast college they met at, moved to different cities, got real jobs and drifted apart without ever really saying goodbye.

I passed Life Is Pretty along to a few of my new friends in Atlanta, though I doubt they still listen to the album like I do (and like I’m pretty sure Marie does, though she and that boyfriend broke up long before the band did). Over the years, I heard vague, third-hand talk of reunion shows, but who knows if that ever panned out? All I know is the silver CD-R is lost somewhere in the nether-regions of my bedroom at my parents’ house—probably still in the CD case I lugged around all through college—but the tracks are safe on my iPod. And they never cease to make me grin when they pop up on shuffle.

I smile because it’s fun music, because there’s something very specifically pleasurable about singing along with a song called “Pants Fever,” because it reminds me of my freshman year and how ridiculous it was in so many ways that I couldn’t even understand at the time—and because selfishly, but through no fault of my own, The Tourettes are still a little secret that I’m one of the only ones in on. That feels kinda quaint, too, that we can still have secrets in this world of music where bands can rise and fall faster than I’d ever wish on any friend or friend of a friend or friend of a friend of a friend.

But if you’d like to spoil my fun, here’s Life Is Pretty in its downloadable entirety, courtesy of the year 2002. Have at it.

Rachael Maddux is Paste’s assistant editor. Her column appears at PasteMagazine.com every Monday.