Bored Nothing: Some Songs

- Fergus Miller, the oh-so-slacker Bored Nothing is getting a suspicious amount done for a supposed layabout. His first album, snapped up by the taste-making Spunk Records when he was just twenty-two, got shopped around widely and was well liked for its range of indie / slacker influences. The now twenty-four year-old is throwing down his second full-length, so it’s clear he’s a fairly high-functioning no-hoper. There really was a considered breadth of inspiration on his debut, it had people reaching for everyone from Big Star to Teenage Fanclub, Best Coast to The Rolling Stones. Perhaps it got obscured amongst all the other sounds everyone was hearing and, to be fair, his name got trotted out every now and then, but to my ears the whispered intensity of Elliott Smith was the overriding point of reference there and I’ve always been surprised more people didn’t think so too. I actually got to quip Fergus about it when I ran into him at a gig, and he countered, “Nah...Heat Miser.” Oh, you're going to be like that, are you, guy? If anything the sensation returns with redoubled force on this new record, Some Songs. Just hear the urgent acoustic strumming and husky multi-tracked vocal of opener, Not. Still, there’s more going on here, as we’ll find out. Miller has previously drawn fire for wearing his slackerness on his sleeve, a pervasive surface that gives little indication of actual depth, under the ennui. The quietly fevered intensity, the murmured outburst that sets everything moving in an unsettling manner, even though it inarticulately refuses to detail the interpersonal problems it tiptoes around, is a tense riposte to flabby laziness. Advance single Ice-cream Dreams eases off the tension and in the process becomes a classic 90’s acoustic rock anthem, even if it does edge closer to those glassy-eyed doledrums. The Rough starts, habitually, to quietly pick at the scabs of those relationship problems again. The addition of fuzzy synth and strangely crumbly, sampled beats are an interesting addition - like a meeting of Elliott Smith and The Magnetic Fields? Maybe it’s a little too early to get that depressing. More recent single, We Lied, holds on to the synthesiser and, in its own mopy way, makes a proper synth-pop tune with it. Those Stephen Merritt sensations are getting stronger; it has a quietly propulsive, melancholy beauty. The tiny, minute-and-a-half vignette Ultra-Lites is poignant in the extreme: a ringing acoustic guitar backs a story where the mundane becomes the transcendent, cigarettes become a life-line, a mirror for the way depression suddenly dissolves into ludicrous joy in a mind trying to right itself. I hear another single in the chiming retro-rock of Do What You Want, Always. It would sound classic in any decade, right back to the ‘60s. Why Were You Dancing With All Those Guys has already done the rounds as a single, way back in April. A soft-rocking un-love song, which...if I talk about Elliott Smith one more time, I’m going to get bored with myself, but, really. Fortunately at this point, the arc of the album adjusts and Where Would I Begin lifts the mood of such potentially wrist-slitting territory with a decidedly upbeat power-pop. Come Back To takes it a step further with a shoegaze pop burn and a riff that soars, even as the vocals whisper dreamily. Songs For Jedder and Don’t Get Sentimental remind us that Fergus is also a big fan of My Bloody Valentine. The guitar textures thins the pop to near emaciation on penultimate number, Artificial Flower, letting a post-punk cold breeze in. After the initial shining fragment, I was very keen to hear Ultra-Lites II, which turns out to be an unexpected power-pop anthem, rewarding the listener for the tenaciousness and finally tapping the third in Miller’s trifecta of musical faves, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, at the same time as retaining the rending Smith-style lyrics. It’s a big and colourful closer. Some Songs once more draws on a breadth of pop history, lessons which Fergus Miller has studied hard and turned into a bounty of retro-pop excellence. Elliott Smith is again a figure looming large at nearly all times, working a vein of intelligent, claustrophobic sadness into all but the most unguardedly slacker moments. The result: warm, sweet and melancholy, is easily one of the most listenable and, sadly, addictively repeatable indie-rock experiences I expect to have this year. - Chris Cobcroft.