Logic Will Break Your Heart

10/16/2003 4:00 PM, Yahoo! Music
Lyndsey Parker

Back in the Seattle-smitten '90s, the ludicrous idea of a credible band borrowing liberally and shamelessly from the '80s seemed like just about the most (ahem) footloose act of career suicide imaginable. But what a difference a decade makes: Now new-new-wavers like Interpol, Longwave, Stellastarr, Ima Robot, and myriad electroclashers are looking back at the big '80s through rose-colored Wayfarers, filtering out all the dreck that wasn't even considered cool back in the day (Richard Marx, the Hooters, Glass Tiger, Chris DeBurgh, Huey Lewis, the list goes on) and reinventing the once-despised decade as the prolific post-punk period that blessed us solely with Joy Division, Echo & the Bunnymen, the Cure, and the Jesus & Mary Chain. And what they're coming up with naturally sounds about a zillion times fresher and hipper than the sluggish dinosaur rock of today's hoary grunge revivalists like Nickelback and Puddle Of Mudd.

Enter cooler-than-you Montreal four-piece the Stills, whose jangly, moody guitar-pop evokes that pivotal scene in the '80s cinematic classic Valley Girl in which freshly moussed city slicker Nicolas Cage drags his sheltered suburban sweetheart to a slimy, sticky-floored Hollywood hole-in-the-wall where paisley-clad college-rockers the Plimsouls proceed to rock the joint with "Million Miles Away" and change the course of her privileged life. All 12 tracks on the Stills' debut album--particular the stunning bits of shoegazery titled "Love & Death" and "Still In Love"--sound like lost treasures from an underground '80s band that never got its rightful place on the airwaves between Mr. Mister and Mr. Big, but at the same time, each song is also perfectly in sync with what's going on right now. In other words, the Stills are cool, not just retro-cool. In fact, their tune "Lola Stars & Stripes" is as timelessly hip as the Kinks' "Lola," so much so that it might finally obliterate all associations of the name Lola with that insipid Barry Manilow tune about the showgirl who wore a diamond.