Released in 2002, debut EP The Handbag Memoirs was anchored around "The Bronze Beached Boys (Come On Let's Go)," the disc's first track and supposedly the band's attempt to construct the perfect pop song in just one evening. (If you don't know it, you've still probably heard it, as a year or so later the track served as the backing to a ubiquitous Saturn commercial that helped finance the group's second EP). In a number of ways, that opening salvo was as good as they ever got: a short, sunny burst of acoustic guitars, bubbly "ba ba ba"s and frontman Casimer Pascal's affected, falsetto vocals that made its point and got it over with before wearing out its welcome. At only six tracks it's still overly long, though "I'd Bet My Life That You Bet Your Life" swung with a western bounce, while "I Wanna Take You Out In Your Holiday Sweater" proved perhaps the band's best-ever attempt at an up-tempo Belle and Sebastian pastiche. Elsewhere, however, the EP sputtered ("Grown Men Go-Go" and "Marion/Mariam") and downright failed, especially on the overcooked "This Ain't For Everyone."
Still, it was a promising first try, and it's hard to think of that offering without also considering the follow-up EP, 2004's Oh Honey, We're Ridiculous. Both discs feel cut from the same cloth, though on Oh Honey the band attempted to turn its faux-refinement on its head with the raucous (by their standards) "What Happened to the Sands?," while also broadening their horizons - a sign of what was to come. PAS/CAL's greatest failure was always an inability to rein themselves in and limit the number of ideas crammed into one song, exemplified by the fact that the band (or, more specifically, most likely Pascal) never met a coda he didn't like, often stretching songs way beyond their logical end point (see: nearly every song on their lone full-length LP). On standout track "Dear Maude," Pascal serenades a 115-year-old woman whose only wish is to not see another birthday. "Dear God, please deliver a swift blow/ At least let me catch a bad cold/ And I'll be gone in a fortnight," he sings, channeling the wit of Jarvis Cocker, who surely would have had the good sense not to tack on another 90 seconds at the end of the song. "Bem, Please Come Home" could have soundtracked a Wes Anderson film, though one gets the sense that the pretensions of Whit Stillman might be more to the band's liking.After those first two releases, the magic was basically gone. Between Oh Honey and the 2006 Dear Sir EP, the band released a vinyl holiday single, covering Wham!'s "Last Christmas," as well as "Summer is Almost Here," part of a 12-inch split, all the while continually promising that a full-length was on the way. Dear Sir, then, was meant to be a holdover and a tease to the forthcoming LP, though it ended up as a collection of tracks with very little binding them together as a unit, most of which shouldn't have been released in the first place.
In 2008, PAS/CAL finally released the long-awaited I Was Raised on Matthew, Mark, Luke and Laura LP, though by that point it seemed less like a victory lap and more like the last few drops coming out of the tap after the water's been shut off. For starters, at least a quarter of Luke and Laura's material pre-dated the rest, as the band recycled and/or revised tracks from previous releases. But the larger problem was that much of the disc came off as having spent too much time in the percolator: too few songs stuffed with too many ideas, to the point that there are any number of magical moments within songs, but few songs that actually carry that magic all the way through. For a band that had simply nailed it on their first try in "The Bronze Beached Boys," it was a lackluster finale, to say the least. After six years of waiting, we expected more.After the album was released, that was essentially it for PAS/CAL. The band rarely played live in its hey day (and certainly not much beyond Detroit and New York), and there were few (if any) shows to support the record and no new music since then. A visit to the group's website redirects to a dormant MySpace account, and Wikipedia lists them as having been inactive since 2008. It's a disappointing end to what could have been, though those first two EPs still hold up, their best moments a promise of something great that never really fully materialized.
(Originally posted 11/9/10 at SpectrumCulture.com)
