Dye It Blonde
The Smith Westerns
The last time I went to value village I bought a large black sweater with bright geometric shapes overlapping on it. the sweater is a little too big for me but I like it a lot because I feel like a seven-year old wearing it. you sound like that a little, playing instruments too big for your size. it’s cute. you sound cute. before you sounded lo-fi, but then between the last album and this album someone gave you money, except not enough money, so now you sound mid-fi maybe.
but value village is not even a village, just a store, which is a disappointment. speaking of disappointments, in ‘weekend,’ I kept hearing “is it normal to go through life oh so normal” which I thought was a good line until I realized that the last word is actually “formal,” which made the good line a dull line.
according to your lyrics, weekends are good and special girls are special. listening to you makes me want to do cute things like compare hand sizes with someone, sing in my living room using a remote control as my microphone, knit a stuffed animal, a small octopus maybe, or put sprinkles on a cupcake and then just stare at the cupcake and hopefully delay eating the cupcake forever. another part of me wants to do something angry like screaming into a pillow then punching the pillow and whisper threats to the pillow, just to see what that feels like; doing angry things with you singing cute things in the background.
“dye it blonde,” you tell me. “dye the whole world blonde.” I think what you mean is that we should all be loud and ride in big vans towards our destiny and leave our mark on the world by “dyeing” it whatever colour is our colourful self. but then the word “dye” made me think of “acid dye” and I thought “acid dyeing the world,” which sounded like a more interesting idea.
I feel like giving you relationship advice now. who is this girl you keep referring to? there’s like ten songs on you and you use the word “love” something like thirty times and the word “heart” about fifteen times also. maybe if you had one original, genuine emotion instead of several generic, primitive emotions, that girl would like you—I think.
This article originally appeared in Volume 31, Issue 19, published January 18, 2011.
