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The Minus 5
As the heartbreaking news of the Young Fresh Fellows plane crash settled in, YFF rhythm guitarist and professional optimist Scott McCaughey realized that every cloud has a silver lining. Finally freed up to concentrate exclusively on the Minus 5, McCaughey began a furious assault on the recording studios of his adopted home town of Portland. Portland is a city in the northwest corner of the United States, though not quite as cornerly as McCaughey's previously adopted hometown, Seattle. Coercing a brigade of local legends to make the music for him, February '09 was booked and finalized. The resulting disc is called
Killingsworth.
Killingsworth is an aptly named thoroughfare that borders northeast Portland's "Alberta Arts District", where these songs were primarily conceived and executed. These songs were killed for you. Scott's old buddy John Moen, who has been a Dharma Bum and a Maroon and a Jick, and is now a Decemberist (he is also a human being), wove a noose out of papyrus, and helped lasso his current bandmates and other notables to flesh out the arrangements on a dismal and disturbing array of soon-to-be-classics. The effervescent smokin' drinkin' Little Sue and the four ultra-stylish priestesses once known as the Shee Bee Gees provided welcome feminine counterpoint to the song cycle's wanton depravity (It's not truly a song cycle, nor is it a Richard Strauss tone poem, but the caliber of the material deserves a modicum of pretension). Various members of M. Ward's combo, as well as the very great Norfolk & Western (some of them the same people), played crucial roles in delivering the goods. They were poorly remunerated. Noted novelist and Richmond Fontaine frontispiece Willy Vlautin provided a golden lyrical trampoline, and Timothy Bracy of Mendoza Line fame collaborated on the dance-floor-bound "Dark Hand of Contagion". As ever, Peter Buck put twelve strings or less to optimal use whenever cajoled. Ken Stringfellow sang on a Scandinavian ferry, fully clothed.
Thus begins a new chapter in the Minus 5 saga. Different than the rest, yet barking up the same monkey tree. If you like sunsets on the beach and having sex with a woman, this is the record for you! And if you have any questions or comments about the music itself, Mr. McCaughey would be glad to elucidate all over you, to the best of his ability, which varies according to the situation. I have this information from the source.
Robert Stove
Editor in Chief, The Electric Bird Digest
THE Magazine for Amateur Electrobird
P.S. When you hear these songs in live performance, perhaps in August or September, in Kentucky or Lake Arrowhead, you may not recognize them. That's because perfection can never be reproduced or aborted, and if it could, it would be too expensive. When a band resembling The Baseball Project play these songs on tour, they will sound new and much louder. Bring your own pedal steel, the one that lives in your head. We all have a pedal steel in our heads.
