Oohs & Aahs

We Say...

Review by Corey DuBrowa

Like fellow New Yorkers Nada Surf, Say Hi (abbreviated from the days when they were better known as Say Hi to Your Mom) has signed to the Seattle indie label Barsuk, spent a fair bit of time recording in the Jet City — frontman Eric Elbogen, who essentially is Say Hi, has since relocated from Brooklyn to the Pacific Northwest — and hurtled relentlessly toward a brand of fast-forward quirk-rock that might've been labeled "power pop" in a previous, more enlightened age, but these days gets lumped into the big pig-pile sloppily known as "indie rock." This isn't entirely fair to Elbogen. All one has to do is spin through his sixth album in seven years, Oohs & Aahs, to find radio-ready gems such as "November Was White, November Was Grey" — paeans to classic pop built around instantly hummable choruses ("I'll feel better when the winter's gone") that rub the sad and happy sticks together to make fire in that inimitable Zombies/Beach Boys/Cars sort of way.

Elbogen spends a good portion of this album unapologetically writing about girls and what it's like to be a pop musician trying to appeal to them — "Elouise" deploys an epic guitar riff to tell a lovelorn story of an FM deejay whose "voice is pure and soft when she stumbles on her words/and every boy in town is pretty sure that he deserves to marry her someday soon;" "Maurine" is a synth-driven, minor-key masterpiece about the proverbial one who got away (surely, it can't be long before Elbogen tries a few Shoes or 20/20 covers on for size); "Sallie's Heart Is Stone" features a shivering, tremolo-infected guitar line that perfectly sets up a wistful tale of spurned summer love set to the "hum of cellos in C-sharp playing waltzes for shuffling feet." Elbogen winkingly tweaks the hipoisie on songs like "Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh," which willfully borrows from familiar sources (in this case, an interpolation of Nirvana's "Polly" merged with a backward take on the Stones' "Satisfaction") and tosses out lyrics like marchers do chocolate coins at a parade: "She's pushing 5'6" in her Saucony kicks/she's got lips like a sofa and she's strawing down a soda" before self-consciously referencing Built to Spill's "Randy Described Eternity."

Elbogen once wrote nearly an entire album (2006's Impeccable Blahs) about vampires, so in some respects it's possible to interpret Oohs & Aahs as the logical synthesis of his power-pop fixation: a home-recorded tribute to life-long fandom.