The Nields - Gotta Get Over Greta: It's easy, with many many rock bands, to get the impression from their lyrics that they decided to be in a band first, and only later acknowledged that this suggests that they need to write some words for their songs. I never got the impression, for example, that Steve Perry would have spent his lunch hours writing love poems even if he'd turned out to be an insurance clerk rather than a singer. The Nields lyrics, on the other hand, have the feel of family gossip, childhood pageants, late-night discussions and long-distance confessions. They feel like stories that came first, little dramas that weren't thought up to fill the meter, but, quite the reverse, were what drove the family into music to begin with, searching for the proper setting for their tales. And so we get the charming inside-joke insistence on referring to the philandering older man in "Best Black Dress" by his full name ("Mr. George Fox" they sing, forming the words so precisely that, though no rancor is evident, I feel certain the family is smiling sardonically at remembrances of the man's transgressions), the title-track's ambivalence about growing up (where I particularly like the projection of adult standards onto childhood relationships when they describe the end of a childhood friendship by "there is no divorce more final"), the frank inside perspective on an anonymous sexual encounter in "I Know What Kind of Love This Is", the adolescent dominance games of "King of the Hill", and childhood memory itself in "All the Pretty Horses".
To me the most affecting pair, however, are "Fountain of Youth" and "Cowards", which come back to back towards the album's end. The crisp, bouncy "Fountain of Youth" is almost certainly the most fascinating pop song I can recall about a younger woman's view of her affair with a married older man. "'Here are the keys to my Infiniti', you say to me", she sings, both reporting his come-on and, effectively, her reaction to it. When she dreams, in the middle of the song, about his wife, things could easily take a cliched turn, but Nerissa avoids this deftly by having the dream take a surreal (and perfectly dreamlike) turn, in which the narrator and the wife are discussing the man's immaturity, and wondering if he'll ever have children, despite the presence of lots of photographs in which he already has some. "Cowards" is a stalled-relationship song that gets its authenticity and pathos not from the relationship itself, but from the contrast between the couple's denial of their stasis and the reactions of their friends and family.
Even the album's packaging suggests a lineage. The intricate hand-done layout of the lyrics reminds me strongly of the program for a family play, and the profusion of iconographic illustrations suggests an intimate involvement with these songs, as if the contents of this album were selected from an overflowing chest of personal treasures, rather than just being invented to fill the running time. In an era where too many albums sound to me like they were made because the creators had a record contract, it's profoundly encouraging to hear one that sounds like it would have been made even if there were no record contracts, no records, and nobody but the band themselves to hear it. And even though I'm not related to them, I like it, too. From: https://www.furia.com/page.cgi?type=twas&id=twas0060
