Wake up and Disappear

Chronique

Boston brood-core pundits Tugboat Annie continue to stare at their shoes and be afraid of girls. On 1995's Superfriends, Tugboat Annie gave listeners tender, statical indie pop about heartbreak, technology, and outer space. And Wake Up and Disappear, Tugboat Annie's sophomore album, makes no attempt to do anything different. They're one-trick ponies, sure. But on Wake Up and Disappear, Tugboat Annie refines that trick into something uniquely the band's own. There's more of the same, but in an ultimately good way: The pleading rasp of Mike Bethmann's vocals; light, tense guitars orbiting plodding drums; the summer's-end angst. Don't be cowed by Wake Up and Disappear's opening songs, which are more radio-friendly but less bold: "Posterboy" and "Vendetta" negotiate the familiar territory of hipster critique, but are catchy only in a peripheral way. And skip right over the melodramatic "Suicide Shoes," a whiner straight out of the Goo Goo Dolls cutout bin. Despite occasionally tired material, Wake Up and Disappear remains nonstop sad, sensitive fun. However, the album doesn't find itself until more than halfway through. Bethmann loves to hate himself, and the anxious, understated "745" shows he can still mope it up with emo's finest with epigrams like "What doesn't kill me only makes me tired." Deftly arranged twilit guitars on "Push It Over into Space" show Tugboat Annie coming into its own, capturing the emotional distance and muted tension sought on Superfriends while offering a look at what the band would become on its 1998 EP, Separation Songs. Though more mature than Superfriends, Wake Up and Disappear continues to navigate the terrain that Tugboat Annie knows best: ambivalence and dissonance with a fast-paced world. The fortune-cookie message on the album's inside cover says, ironically: "You will be advanced socially, without any special effort." Wake Up and Disappear presses fiercely and hopelessly toward that goal with an addicting mixture of neurosis and heart. Dust off your insecurities and prepare to despair.
© Bill Peters /TiVo