Oleander - February Son

What a coincidence, i'm a February Son and so is Oleander's 2nd album. I actually remember the first time i heard Why I'm Here on the radio in my '77 Chevy van in the parking lot of a coffee shop in Bethany. Is the album still listenable 23 years later? I guess you and i will both find out. 

The core sentiment here is clearly defined. I don't want to hate everybody, but it's already too late and i hate everybody. Yeah, that's about the gist of it. 

The first thing you'll notice though is that this is a whole lot slicker than Local H; the spendy-time string section is a pretty dead giveaway. That's not bad, but it is a thing we have to navigate if we're talking about some sort of real world v. some sort of facade populated by posers. I don't buy that argument and i'll tell you why, it sounds good. Fun fact, same producer as Local H, Steven Haigler, but 3 years later. At the end of the day, no producer or engineer sets out to hack together a crappy sounding record because they do or don't like the band. They might stop caring half way through, but it's part of their unfolding portfolio to get more paying work. 

I make it sound like Oleander isn't holding up so well. That's not exactly true. Critics at the time said "Nirvana clones, next!," but that's not a fair comparison just because Why I'm Here is structurally identical to Heart Shaped Box. I hear way more Fuel and Matchbox 20 here despite the harder edged Seether type sound. 

Now, i definitely don't like Thomas Flowers' needless Aguilera-like mellismating, but he doesn't do it all the time. Then again, "boy-hoy-ee-oy-ee-oys don't cry" is exactly as terrible as you expect. I also don't like the split personality that shows up in the form of every third song or so being a "we're pretty boys with deep feelings" type of song. It's an album intended to be marketed at "girlfriends," and i despise that because as we'll see in later albums this was a real boom time for women in Alt-Rock. 

This album also has a bit of a twist to it. As mentioned, we start off in safe Gen-X, everything sucks territory, then morph into the Adult Contemporary Gen-X middle, then kind of like you were hoping they wouldn't do, they crash into the empty swimming pool of a Stephen Jenkins type "i'm not going to give up without a fight like my lazy non-trendy friends" dare to punch them in their smarmy faces. 

I know it's hard to reconcile the fact that this is a great album that i hate, but it's completely true. The songs flow, the logic makes sense, it does something as an album. I don't at all like that thing it does, but that's totally me. "Everyone i know considers me a clown... and they're probably right so i'm gonna work really hard to conform" is some real corporate-funded motivational speaker crap that i just can't get behind. Especially when your band is named after the extremely toxic and ubiquitous plant in your home state of California. I can no longer tell if you're saying that your environment is toxic and you're going to fight the self-loathing it created in you, or if you're really saying i woke up and decided to embrace the Yuppie life, now i couldn't be happier. Mixed messages, that's what you're sending. So, when it's all said and done, i have a sneaking suspicion you guys might qualify as "high-fiving motherfuckers." Probably not on steroids, but maybe overly fond of material success over substance. Grain of salt on that one, though; I did just finish writing this easy like Sunday morning essay on my new wrap around porch wearing flip-flops.