- Welcome to Daytrotter
- Hocus Pocus
- Silent Prayer
- Would It Kill You To Die For Me?
- White Tiger
When you’re living in Austin, Texas, and Robert Plant moves in as your next door neighbor or when you happen to find the missing component/member of your band through what should have been a hopeless fling of whimsy and lost cause-ness, it seems like you might have very little leg to stand on when you’re claiming that God has downsized the number of miracles he’s been willing to perform per annum. You’re a band of men – 3/4ths of whom left Jackson, Mississippi, for Austin with another band, just to see it all fall apart and deciding, what the hell, we’ll just stay put – who seem to find implausibility to be the norm. There are some interesting contextual contradictions to the nearly impossible to Google band called BOY, a group of four that has a lot going for it in its early stages – not the least of it are their bright and melodic, quirky power-pop songs that make us believe that there are powers at work. They seem to fit somewhere between the treadmill video song contributions of the likes of OK Go and something wackier and more experimental, like Suckers, and they have a tendency to support the good vibrations of fate, even if they sometimes come in a backhanded way.
You can hear lead singer Joshua Clark sing about “how curiously strange” it is to be in his 30s, as if he couldn’t imagine ever making it to that age, like it took some divine intervention to pull him from the wreckage of his youth. It also could just be that there’s nothing that prepares a head for the thought that you’re no longer in your 20s when you’d never really thought that anything could ever be otherwise. You were going to be young until you died and the happiness thing would come along with it, hand-in-hand. There are all kinds of insinuations that we’re all riding bubbles, just waiting for them to burst and, when they remain intact, we are to believe that we’re catching a break. They are just the silent prayers being answered or the tender-footed miracles hat seem to happen, but rarely register on the giant tote board. They find their disappointment and amazement in the simple act of love – looking for surrender and retreat, depending on what the situation calls for. They succumb to the blindness of it all and explore the mirth that comes out of the puzzlement.
BOY songs seem to involve people who have tried nearly everything in their lives and they’re now at a point where they’re happily at the mercy of whatever’s going to happen because they’re not sure if they’re any wiser than they were when they started trying to understand anything. They are people who “can’t ever hope to reek of money” and they’re just seeking hope inside a melody, as they sing about in the shambolic and delightful howl of a song like “Silent Prayer.” Clark sings, “And how I danced for hours/How I must have looked to others.” It’s neither a happy dance, nor an aggrieved one, just one of everyday causes.