Smith Westerns :: "Varsity"

The Smith Westerns have always sought to define musical laissez-faire, a sort of a shabbiness that they redefined as cool. The image was manufactured, an intentional brand of performance art, the process of trying to not try. After all, a band simply couldn't build compositions as lush and winking with so much nostalgia by accident. On latest single, "Varsity," the band sounds like a opiate-laced Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, the pre-chorus lyric, the shrugging, "I guess that's a point of view," before the synthesizers metamorphose to the top of the room. Still barely beyond college-aged, Smith Westerns traffic easily in unremembered nostalgia, the memories of things that just happened or never happened at all, shot through a hazy filter and packaged for consumption. Like the crafting of their image, it sounds intentionally, difficultly languid, a prettiness that isn't a bit insouciant.